If you mess with the Good Book,you might mistake the Hebrew “ray” for “horn”—karan and keren easy to confuse—and like Michelangelo,envision Moses at Sinai with horns on his headinstead of suffused with a heavenly glow—another gift from the God of Stone Tablets.So much depends on a single vowel issuing forthfrom the rattling depths of a throat, as in last words,when meaning shapes lips gasping for breath—perhaps one small clue about the afterlife—or your son’s ex-girlfriend who conversedwith God despite the haze of Haldol dispensed each dayin pulp-free orange juice—new translationsthanks to missed doses—squeezingthat divine voice from the pulpit of her dreaming.In another time you might have paid a pricefor putting the Word in other words,like William Tyndale, strangled then set on fireor John Wycliffe, ashes strewn along the River Swiftfor wrestling with the sacred in your native tongue.
In Other Words
Feature Date
- June 21, 2023
Series
- Editor's Choice
Selected By
- Heather Green
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“In Other Words” from PIANO IN THE DARK: by Nancy Naomi Carlson.
Published by Seagull Books on August 5, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by Nancy Naomi Carlson.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Nancy Naomi Carlson won the 2022 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize for translating Khal Torabully’s Cargo Hold of Stars: Coolitude (Seagull, 2021). Author of thirteen titles (nine translated), her second poetry collection, An Infusion of Violets (Seagull, 2019), was named “New & Noteworthy” by The New York Times. A recipient of two translation grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Carlson’s poems, translations, and essays have appeared in APR, The Georgia Review, Los Angeles Review, Paris Review, Poem-a-Day, and Poetry, and she’s the Translations Editor at On the Seawall.
Poetry from an especially deft magician of words.
This latest book of wonders from Nancy Naomi Carlson fixes upon one of the few defenses we have to confront the body’s betrayals—our words. Though in the end, even the world’s last word “forgets its name . . . has no word for this forgetting.” At once vulnerable and open, tempered and tempted equally by the erotic and the empathic, such dualities limn these affectingly beautiful and lyrical poems. Carlson’s lines, entreating as Scheherazade, “weave chords / into tales within tales, whirlpools within seas” to save her life. Indeed, music has no need for voice or harp, as “in anechoic chambers, you become / the only instrument of your worldly sounds,” echoing Mozart’s credo “that music lies / in the silence between notes.” In a world scarred by pandemics, wars, and violent tribalism, the givens are gone—“talismans we clung to, believing / we might be spared in some way / by marking our doors / with our own sacrificial blood.” In these unflinching free and formal verse poems, Carlson seduces us with the promise of the joy yet to be had, were we to look in the right places.
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