Murat Nemet-Nejat
Animals of the Dawn ISBN: 978-1-58498-123-7, paper, $15.95 |
In Nemet-Nejat's work, poetry, translation and ideas are unified into a totality. They interact together in a visual space akin to cinema. Particularly during the last twenty years, he has called his work "a cinema of words" in which the reader "sees" his poems as fluid, ever-changing tissues of thought infused with emotion. Jerome Rothenberg: "The intertwining of poetry & poetics has marked Murat Nemet-Nejat’s work over many years & fits in perfectly, as here, with what I’ve been getting at on Poems and Poetics. In his new book from Talisman House Publishers the complexity & range of his mind comes across again in a dazzling display of language & intelligence, summed up beautifully in a single long sentence by Maria Damon: “A radiant matrix of intertextuality, Animals of Dawn, in holding a vast array of precedent texts –as disparate as Hamlet, ‘Un Coup de Dés,’ and Basho’s famous frog haiku– in constellated suspension, creates an aubade-as-web-of-wonders in which we animals wake from our sleep to the marvels of language as the impossibly strong, invisibly powerful net that sustains us all –texts, sentient beings, texts as sentient beings and vice versa– in electric, vibrating relation.” Joseph Donahue: “In Animals of Dawn, the entire creaturely world enacts a single drama, one that would reveal the complex relations of time, chaos, and consciousness. This drama, this single soliloquy, is the long awaited final act of an earlier play written by the poet in a previous incarnation, the play that has come down to us as Hamlet. The melancholy Dane and his whole disastrous family is here, but fleetingly. On stage before us, erudite, elusive, witty, deeply pained, is a melancholy Irano-Turkish Jew, sharp-tongued, incredulous at the unfolding of his fate, remembering innocence, desire, loss, and death, in sharp, flashing lines. This book reads fast. You won’t see what’s coming. You don’t get at first what has just hit you, but then you do.” Maria Damon: “A radiant matrix of intertextuality, Animals of Dawn, in holding a vast array of precedent texts –as disparate as Hamlet, “Un Coup de Dés,” and Basho’s famous frog haiku– in constellated suspension, creates an aubade-as-web-of-wonders in which we animals wake from our sleep to the marvels of language as the impossibly strong, invisibly powerful net that sustains us all –texts, sentient beings, texts as sentient beings and vice versa– in electric, vibrating relation.” Patrick Herron: “Nemet-Nejat's poem plugs the visual content of language into the soul, just as a post-cinematic film slips affect between the 60 frames per second of digital cinema into our bodies. Nemet-Nejat's poetic movements hurtle vertically like film, goading us to engage visually with them, sometimes slow and linear, sometimes quickly and in different directions... How do we reconcile time as that inevitable directed flow with its programmatic steady appearances and disappearances with a new version of time, one infinitely divisible and rearrangeable and yet somehow always accumulating? I cannot find a better example of any engagement with the strange arrangements of our new experience of time, self, and media than in Nemet-Nejat's Animals of Dawn.” Christopher Sawyer-Lauҫanno: “Appearances and dis-appearances. Existence and non-existence. Radical erasures, substitutions, subtractions, additions. Words kindle thought, thought kindles words. Form continually renews itself against a backdrop of the cosmos moving toward the infinite. And at the center is Hamlet as you’ve never before experienced him and Shakespeare’s drama as you’ve never read or seen it. Reality and unreality mingle, take bows together on a shape-shifting stage. Animals of Dawn is brilliant, profound, challenging, and at times unnerving in the closeness it cuts to the bone. Nemet-Nejat’s extraordinary vocabulary of what is and what isn’t is a reflection of his very deep learning and thinking. ‘If aught of woe or wonder, cease your search.’” Peter Valente: “Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet, is the holy text at the center of Murat Nemet-Nejat’s masterful new book-length poem, Animals of Dawn. Murat exposes what is not immediately visible in the play, but he ‘whirls’ around the subject, never capturing it. Here is the Sufi idea that we cannot see the world directly as it is; we know there is wind because the branches move, but we cannot see the wind. In the poem, the I is fluid and open, and in this way, Murat allows ‘other voices’ to speak through him: he is Hamlet, Ophelia, Polonius, Laertes, Gertrude, himself. What these voices reveal, as well as conceal, is the source of this poem’s mysterious lyrical beauty. In this poem, Murat attempts to articulate what is at the very margins of the sayable. In doing so, he takes great risks and the evidence of the poem shows that they paid off brilliantly.” Aryanil Mukherjee: “In an emergent dialogue between foils of the self, refined voices of spiritual dissent, denial and critique arise in Murat Nemet-Nejat’s Animals of Dawn. A book-length poem of many visual textures, fogging the fences between poetry and prose, it’s a lovely, tempting book, a mandril of gyrating beauty. To go into it is like walking into a night promising those erotic and erosive journeys that knowledge and reason fumble with and then drop like hot potatoes.” John High: “In this sweep of imagination of Ghostscript of Ghosts no longer Who can remain as ghosts an opus in time transforms into the timelessness of being tumbling out of words (mouths/ideograms/silences & mirrors) that are the animals of the Kind-Dom of worlds, known & unknown, being itself translating itself into Nothingness ‘from things real or unreal, objects living or un-living’ and bringing us inside the great waves of compassion and of their no separation of their no death or birth of their end of language as anything more than becoming who we are and were and will be. All these animals of dawn traipsing the palm of a hand.” Murat Nemet-Nejat is presently working on his poem Camels & Weasels. His recent publications include his translation from the Turkish poet Ece Ayhan, A Blind Cat Black and Orthodoxies (1997, new edition 2015), and the essays “Holiness and Jewish Rebellion: ‘Questions of Accent’ Twenty Years Afterward,” Languages of Modern Jewish Cultures: Comparative Perspectives (University of Michigan Press, 2016) and “Dear Charles, Letters from a Turk: Mayan Letters, Herman Melville and Eda,” Letters for Olson, gathered and ed. Benjamin Hollander (Spuyten Duyvil, 2016). |