Last month’s earthquake in Chile brought up warnings of a tsunami, once again, bringing to mind the terrible Indian Ocean earthquake of December 26, 2004. But it also reminded me of a very different tsunami that I’d almost forgotten: a chapbook of poems I published under that title just two weeks before the Boxing Day tsunami. It was, in the words of the one review it received, an unfortunate coincidence, to say the least.
For a long time, poetry was all I really cared about, though it didn’t begin that way: I started writing poems as a way to sharpen my skills for my goals of writing fiction and reportage. It was a kind of cross-training — sure, I could tell a good story in 2,000 words, but could I do it in 38 words? Could I do it in iambic pentameter? Tetrameter? Rhymed? Slant-rhymed?
After a while, though, I began to write poems for the sake of writing poems. The first were published in small magazines while I was in a grad program for French literature in Paris, where I worked on translations as part of my coursework at the Sorbonne Nouvelle. After a few years, however — after I had moved to Prague and begun writing my own stuff just as hard as I could — they began to appear in better magazines. Seven were in the Times Literary Supplement in London. One was in the New Republic. Somebody found that piece and recorded a space-music song with the same title. He even sent me a CD.
So after a few years, I had enough poems for a book, which was put out in a 22-page, 200-copy edition by my friends at Metre Editions in Ireland. The book was distributed at bookshops in Dublin and Prague, and was even listed on Amazon.com in the US for a while. I left a few copies on commission at a bookstore in Sarajevo while I was there for a poetry festival in 2005. Now it seems to have disappeared into the aether, though I was pleased to see it listed in the National Library of Australia.
The book received only one review that I know of, from Stephen Knight in the Times Literary Supplement five years ago on March 18, 2005. Since no one saw that review back then — since I was not on Facebook and certainly wasn’t blogging at the time — I’ll post it here to give the earlier, much smaller Tsunami its due.
Evan Rail, Tsunami. Dublin: Metre.
Skewering his subjects for their intemperance in “Remembering the Swiss”, a sonnet after Joachim du Bellay, Evan Rail is not above indulging himself, most effectively in “and Counting”, its epigraph from Apollinaire’s Alcools and its enjoyable swagger announcing a voice that brims with certainty even as its speaker careers through the streets:
In the sulphur-yellow, anti-violent streetlights
by ball-footed scissor-steps unbound
I am kite-high upon the pavement flying.
Fortunately, Rail’s humour survives his drink-fuelled delusions of omnipotence. “I give off light”, he continues, “by which librarians could reshelf and file”, and he is as much at home the pages of books as out in the world. Occasionally, the two meet: the Seine “spells out /the word for love in Old French”, and blood “curls up like the letters / of an illustrated manuscript”.
A pamphlet of twelve poems , Tsunami opens with “Passport Control” and closes with “Travelling Song”, its final sentence, “I will never be home again”, celebrating its author’s footloose existence. An American-born linguist, Evan Rail studied in France and now lives in Prague. This might have resulted in low-pressure anecdotes of life on the road, but, hearteningly, Rail’s peripatetic biography is instead reflected in a poetry that contemplates borders and the slipperiness of language. Drift – cosmonauts in orbit, regarding “the distance and difference // between us and the world, this measured space”, or the “measured space between the names for things / and things themselves” – is relished. “In Praise of a False Cognate” considers Gift, the German word for poison, while “from Wanderings in Czech” finds the words for ice cream (zmrzlina) and mademoiselle (slecno) insufficiently mimetic. Witty, deftly rhymed and elegantly shaped, this poetry displays a New World confidence having serious fun in Europe.
The unfortunate coincidence of its title notwithstanding, Tsunami is a poised debut. Full of fruitful dislocations, it is a challenge to anyone who believes that a vibrant poetry can only emerge from rootedness. The marriage of gusto and attentiveness in these poems tells a different story.
Stephen Knight
