‘Stalin’s Eyes’ mix of poetry, history UM professor employs postmodern technique

Editor’s Note: Maine Bound features new books that are either by Maine authors, set in the Pine Tree State or have other local ties.

STALIN’S EYES by Tony Brinkley, Puckerbrush Press, Orono, Maine, 2002; 214 pages, trade paperback, $19.95.

Tony Brinkley’s new book of poetry, “Stalin’s Eyes,” constructs itself around the experience of Osip Mandelstam, a Russian Jew who was imprisoned by Josef Stalin in 1934 for writing a poem which compared Stalin, by way of his mustache, to a cockroach. Or rather, the poems are constructed around author Brinkley’s experience of reading the letters and writings of Mandelstam, Mandelstam’s wife, Nadezhda, and their circle of literary and political acquaintances, including Stalin.

From one point of view this is fascinating material. It seeks to synthesize many of the most prominent interests of literary critics of the past couple of decades. What does poetry have to do with history? With politics? With theories of how poetry makes – or fails to make – meaning? The approach to the poems is distinctly “modern,” as we say: It’s a series of lyrics that weave imagery, personal epiphany and historical allusion together with quotations from the writings of Mandelstam and the others, using narrative techniques so unconventional they are invisible to the unpracticed eye.

As a result, this book is from another point of view very slow going. Appropriate to any treatment of 20th century history, it centers on and vividly evokes different kinds of fear, from anxious to terrified. But at the same time, much burden is placed on the reader to know the background and poetic theory not only of Mandelstam’s time, but of our own as well. To help in this, the book is extensively annotated and it’s necessary to keep two fingers in the pages at all times to navigate the book’s currents.

Translations of Mandelstam’s poetry, given as an appendix, were skillfully made by Brinkley, the chair of the University of Maine’s English department, and former UMaine graduate student Raina Kostova of Bulgaria, and they help illuminate Brinkley’s own verse and concerns. Readers with a taste for modern and

postmodern poetry, or with particular interests in the relation of politics and history to the production of literature, will find this a useful entry by a Maine writer. – Dana Wilde

A TURN OF THE WHEEL by D.W. Brainerd, Edgewood Press, 2003; 26 pages, saddle-stitched, $3.

By contrast with “Stalin’s Eyes,” D.W. Brainerd’s simply made chapbook “A Turn of the Wheel” is likely to attract readers with more traditional tastes. As Thoreau discovered while living in his one-room cabin near Concord, Mass., what seems simple is often complex, and this off-the-main-road paradox is an undercurrent of Brainerd’s 22 poems about society, the night sky and God.

The repeated references to God may signal to some readers an intellectual meltdown of some kind, but these poems concern not so much religion, as religious feeling, to use William James’ distinction. Everywhere the poet looks, he detects signs of a creator, and the feeling is expressed simply and, well, rustically. Various poems evoke a humorous awareness of poetry’s age-old relationship to prayer and music, and provide startled observations on the awe that arises on noticing a planet or constellation or condition of the moon for what seems the first time.

“Simplify, simplify,” said Thoreau. D.W. Brainerd lives in a one-room cabin in Howland, where he typeset this pamphlet “on an old Sears electric typewriter, which I run off a 12-volt battery.” The font looks at least 40 years old, the paper is photocopy-quality, and the cover sports a homemade ink drawing.

“A Turn of the Wheel” will seem pretty lightweight to the hip postmodern critic in his never-ending quest for the meaninglessness of life. But for people who read poetry with religion in mind, these pages will offer a sense of real Christian connections to the world of natural awe; and for people who read poetry with religious feeling, the directness of its imagery and most of its language will evoke a sense of the cosmos’ complexities. The author sells copies from P.O. Box 775, Howland 04448. – Dana Wilde

WHEN SOFT WAS THE SUN by Merle Hillman, Puckerbrush Press, Orono, 2003; 512 pages, paperback, $19.95.

Merle Hillman’s novel “When Soft Was the Sun” is, well, a long book about a farm family in the late 1940s. The story depicts the Adamses of central Maine, whose lives center on the cycling seasons, rounds of haying and milking, and the turbulences wrought by encroachments such as World War II on their more or less insulated existence.

In the summer of 1945, Thomas and Evelyn Adams are happy their sons Glen and Paul have returned unscathed from the war. The boys have changed, though. Glen starts making mysterious trips to Boston, and worse, he wants to find his own apartment. Thomas can’t understand why anyone would want to live anywhere but the farm, and Evelyn and daughter Marian, the pistol, are deeply concerned about the boys’ prospects, not to mention cooking supper. A little brother and an assortment of relatives and neighbors round out the insular intimacies and innocent frictions of the Adams family and their farm.

“When Soft Was the Sun” is essentially a rhapsody on Maine days past, the antique diction of its title providing the clue to its emotional tenor. Superabundantly detailed – there are molasses jugs, roast chicken fantasies, toasted marshmallows, old-fashioned milking machines, specially planned expeditions to Bangor, rooms at the YMCA, kissing cousins, war stories between brothers, and many meticulous observations on the weather and its effects on haying – this book is to be read at leisure for its moment by moment accounts of midcentury Maine daily life, without anxiety about what’s going to happen next.

In subject matter “When Soft Was the Sun” seems to owe as much to Ruth Moore as to Merle Hillman’s real life growing up in Maine in the 1930s, which should commend it to readers of Moore, one of Maine’s most accomplished fiction writers. “When Soft Was the Sun” is way longer, though, than anything Ruth Moore ever wrote. – Dana Wilde

Dana Wilde is a copy editor at the NEWS. He can be reached at dana.wilde@umit.maine.edu.