β Scribed by Srikanth Reddy
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Starred Review. Reddy uses as the source for his long-awaited second collection the controversial memoir of Kurt Waldheim, the U.N. secretary general who was found to have been a Nazi SS officer. All the language in Reddy's book comes from Waldheim's; Reddy's three sections comprise three erasures (in which all but a few words are deleted from the source text) of Waldheim's book by different methods. In the first, a series of clipped poetic lines is as much a hazy expression of an everyman's guilty conscience ("He knew the topography of injustice./ It had neither inside nor outside") as it is a specific indictment of global political life since WWII: "One would not wish this account to become a catalogue of the disappeared." Part two is a virtuosic and surprising prose narrative told by someone obsessed with the golden records sent up with the two Voyager space shuttles in 1977, "full of popular tunes and beautiful technological problems." In the third and longest section, a sequence of mostly first-person lyrics in Waldheim's voice beautifully mixes the personal and political concerns of the book: "He complained/ that I did not believe/ in his extraordinary world." The book closes with a series of epilogues that reveal something of the process by which it was composed. Taken together, these recastings form a highly ambitious book of political poetry that speaks hauntingly of our world. (Feb.)
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The paradoxical lives of historical figures have long inspired poets, a tradition Reddy embraces and transforms in his audacious, deeply interrogative second collection. The opening section is strangely disembodied and aphoristically philosophical, even as each line oscillates between outrage and compassion. We learn the source of these rigorous distillations in a cycle of concentrated prose poems, which informs us that among the messages stowed on the Voyager spacecraft, which is now leaving the solar system, is a letter from Kurt Waldheim. Secretary general of the UN when the mission was launched in 1977, Waldheim became a painfully ironic 'spokesman for humanity' once his Nazi past was exposed. In a stunning labor of correction, Reddy crossed out 'line after line' of Waldheim's 1985 memoir, In the Eye of the Storm, and extracted words and phrases that he reassembled to create plangent poems, including a haunting soliloquy. Reddy's book of nuanced yet piercing inquiries into matters of conscience and ambition, truth and power, peace and war emulates its astonishing namesake, arcing across time and space to cast light on mysteries of cosmic significance. --Donna Seaman
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