Book Review of Seguiriyas by Carole Mertz

Many readers and writers at Dreamers Creative Writing bring unique thought to the concepts of “home” and “place,” as does poet Ben Meyerson in his recent collection. His place is Toronto where he writes and studies at the U. of Toronto’s Centre for Comparative Literature, and where he grew up and was nourished by his Ashkenazi Jewish family. But his place is also Granada and sites in the mountains and valleys of southern Spain among its ancient Andalusian architecture and culture. His interests in flamenco, medieval Jewish philosophy, diasporic writings, and Spanish literature underlie his work. Layers of history permeate his lyrical poems, sub voce, in Seguiriyas.
In his Author’s Note, Meyerson explains the derivation of “seguiriyas” and its relation to old Andalusian musical forms; the lyrics of these forms, including seguiriya and soléa, may date from the 18th and 19th centuries, but they often reflect an earlier history—the periods of expulsion from Spain of the Muslims and Moriscos, as well as the presence of Jews prior to their expulsion in 1492.
As readers, we don’t see the actual musical forms laid out on the page, but we experience their abiding presences through Meyerson’s poetry. In his description of an ancient and crumbling church, for example, we are drawn close to the people of an earlier time. See “Under the Antigua Iglesia de San Miguel in Gaudix,” (p.19) a section of which follows:
The tower is roofed in coppery clay
risen amid the bed of a mosque and formed
to the tune of its ghost
made unresolved in its image:
the father’s hand still laced with
the mother’s hardened one to another
voices too known too close
a jewel of presence mashed together in the diaphragm to halt
such distant architecture
The poem reveals that the Catholic church was rebuilt over a Muslim foundation of a prior era, the old stones remaining. We experience the “pearl” of the old masonry, see the old, frayed wood, and almost hear the silence of the eons “as if the gutted building’s erosion / might for a moment stand in for the fading / of the flesh’s lone abutted tract.”
Two particularly interesting segments of this collection are “Two Months in Granada” which discusses Boabdil (explanation follows) and Meyerson’s learned “A Cold Series on Sense” (p.69, cf.) In the poems of the first-mentioned, (pgs. 78-95) the Islamic fortress, the Alhambra, dominates the scene. Boabdil is the personage of the last Muslim ruler of Granada. Meyerson employs a useful poetic device, repeatedly evoking the figure, as if he stands before our eyes:
“On the hill, Boabdil shifts in his saddle, tightens his shawl against the sharp January cold.” And “The gruff gush of Andalu cascades from around the bend. A sparrow near my head bats the world with the tip of its wing.” Later, Boabdil turns his back on the city. “Songs stir and peel open, / bare their insides less like wounds / than turreted flowers.” And later, “It is as if the man has never been: / Boabdil is weeping, in the songs. / Boabdil is tired.”
“Time is what speech is, / A chord that never unites its tones fully before / the hand falters.” Boabdil is leaving, but a gap must be filled. The Cante jondo enters the poem. These are the songs of lost love and displacement. “This is the deep song—,” Meyerson writes, “cante jondo: a refusal to reveal the end / of a body’s feeling or / the limits of its voice’s form.” We are left suspended, as it were, within the unfinished song, struggling against the tension Meyerson creates between his concrete and abstract allusions, his probes into a history we can no longer directly know.
My favorite segment of the collection is the poem sequence: “A Cold Series on Sense” (pgs. 69-76) Meyerson uses quixotic word-diagonals, (see “Sub/Merge,” Sur/Face,” Sub/Rept,” and “Sur/Render”) as subtitles, to describe the sinking of the Spanish Armada as it succumbed to the forces of nature. With brilliant control of his craft, Meyerson weaves Latin quotations from Horace’s Ars Poetica into his historical account. “Time is a ripple that finds its shape on the body’s shore. / Even when we are in the limpid sun it slides / off our skin like a deluge.” In a later passage we read, “Time is not a ripple until it finds the body.” The author often uses wide spaces between words, as if to suggest the passage of time, and his repeating shifts between the concrete and the abstract result in amazing surrealistic passages.
Reading through this marvelous collection, I feel again the importance of “home” and “place.” The ways we write about them may express our innermost sentiments. I highly recommend Meyerson’s Seguiriyas to Dreamers readers. It is wonderful to be transported into this learned author’s particular sense of place, to experience the richness of his language, and to learn more about the Andalusian song-forms that linger through history as if hanging by a thread.
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