Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

En av de senaste decenniernas mest uppmärksammade poeter i USA - för första gången på svenska i bokform»En vacker diktsamling präglad av närvaro där poetens varseblivning och sinnesintryck levandegörs för läsaren.« Betyg: 4 av 5 - Jonas Frånander, BTJMei-mei Berssenbrugges poesi fördjupar sig i myt och landskap, mode och kultur, erfarenhet och glömska. En osynlig värld utforskas där växter och djur kommunicerar och samexisterar med jaget. I en skimrande, mångtydig dikt reflekterar poeten över individens relation till natten och tiden, till vädrets och universums skiftningar, medan titelns rosor - verkliga och mytiska - genomgår en långsam, nästan omärklig förvandling. MEI-MEI BERSSENBRUGGE föddes i Beijing 1947, med en kinesisk mor och en amerikansk far, och kom som ettåring till USA. Hon har tilldelats två American Book Awards för sin poesi. Hej, Rosorna, översatt av Ann Jäderlund och med ett efterord av Jenny Tunedal, är hennes första bok på svenska.

Empathy, first published by Station Hill Press in 1989, marked a turning point in Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s poetry, her lines lengthening across the page like so many horizons, tuned intimately to the natural world and its human relations, at once philosophical, lush, and rhythmic. As she writes in the new note for this edition, “I started to feel my way toward an intuited subliminal wholeness of composition.” In these poems, empathy not only becomes the space of one person inside another, but of one element (water, or fog), one place (tundra or desert mesa), one animal (the swan) as the locus of human illumination and desire.

A Treatise on Stars extends Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s intensely phenomenological poetics to the fiery bodies in a “field of heaven…outside spacetime.” Long, lyrical lines map a geography of interconnected, interdimensional intelligence that exists in all places and sentient beings. These are poems of deep listening and patient waiting, open to the cosmic loom, the channeling of daily experience and conversation, gestalt and angels, dolphins and a star-visitor beneath a tree. Family, too, becomes a type of constellation, a thought “a form of organized light.” All of our sense are activated by Berssenbrugge’s radiant lines, giving us a poetry of keen perception grounded in the physical world, where “days fill with splendor, and earth offers its pristine beauty to an expanding present.”

I Hallo, rosene kommer mennesket og verden hverandre i møte gjennom lange, slyngende linjer som vibrerer av nærvær og oppmerksomhet. Blomster og landskap åpner seg gjennom boken, og bevisstheten med dem, og alt vokser og veves sammen i en bemerkelsesverdig skapelsesberetning for vår tid.

A poet of “epic perception” and “subtle music,” Mei-mei Berssenbrugge opens form into long, shimmering lines of profound emotional intensity and multivalent voices, splintered with space, silence, and desert light. Her new collection of poems, Hello, the Roses, is composed of three parts. The opening poems delve into an array of unities, of myth and landscape, fashion and culture, experience and forgetting, boys and ravens. The central poems explore an invisible world where plants, animals, and the self communicate and coexist. The final part contemplates the individual’s relationship to night, weather, and cosmological time as Berssenbrugge limns a karmic temporal continuum, a mandala of perception. Throughout are the roses, transforming slowly, almost imperceptibly,deepening awareness, creating fields: a rosette of civilization — a wild rose, a Delphic rose, imagined roses, white cabbage roses, an Apache rose, a Bourbon rose, our sacred mortality “saturated with being” in pink petals and gray-green leaves. Hello, the Roses is poetry enraptured with the phenomenal fullness of the world.

The Hello Delay asks what happens around the saying of a thing and the receiving. Inside and outside of our daily communications, there are events, there are silences, déjà-vus, and intentions. These poems question the determined nature of our relationships to one another: What if this territory isn't familiar after all? I Will Whisper it to you so that someone else may hear it. whether or not it's heard by you, whether or not I hear it myself—that it is heard by a stranger. stranger and stranger. get out the fires and fire hoses, put away the stars. daybreak breaks into noon breaks into after, and after is a song, and singing makes you calmer. that's okay but what are they saying down the street and lost on you, lost on you, lost on you. In this human ecology, language is king. In this book, familiarity resides in memory or song, but perhaps nothing is so familiar as the experience of the present. What is it then to be present, when meaning persists among us? We are more than what we say and what we think, but these words are the lucite passages we travel to that aggregate. In this place where understanding means being wrong together or just pretending to be right, Choffel's poems honor the grandeur, the danger, and the mediocrity in manifesting what we make up as we go along. The Hello Delay might be experimental, but it is mostly experiential. It calls us out not to see how we will answer but to linger in the gaps of our refrain.

The Hello Delay asks what happens around the saying of a thing and the receiving. Inside and outside of our daily communications, there are events, there are silences, déjà-vus, and intentions. These poems question the determined nature of our relationships to one another: What if this territory isn't familiar after all? I Will Whisper it to you so that someone else may hear it. whether or not it's heard by you, whether or not I hear it myself—that it is heard by a stranger. stranger and stranger. get out the fires and fire hoses, put away the stars. daybreak breaks into noon breaks into after, and after is a song, and singing makes you calmer. that's okay but what are they saying down the street and lost on you, lost on you, lost on you. In this human ecology, language is king. In this book, familiarity resides in memory or song, but perhaps nothing is so familiar as the experience of the present. What is it then to be present, when meaning persists among us? We are more than what we say and what we think, but these words are the lucite passages we travel to that aggregate. In this place where understanding means being wrong together or just pretending to be right, Choffel's poems honor the grandeur, the danger, and the mediocrity in manifesting what we make up as we go along. The Hello Delay might be experimental, but it is mostly experiential. It calls us out not to see how we will answer but to linger in the gaps of our refrain.

Drawing on four decades of work and including new poems published here for the first time, this selection of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's poetry displays the extraordinary luminosity characteristic of her style - its delicate, meticulous observation, great scenic imagination, and unusual degree of comfort with states of indetermination, contingency, and flux.