BOOK REV I EWS
breathless arousal reminds me of Nijinsky dancing Le Sacre du Printemps. More chaste but no less erotic is “psalm for an origin”, a passionate appeal to the god-within-us, echoing the Song of Songs.
Some poems are experimental, and charming. A hangover is portrayed in “my aching head” where the poet and the reader “see stars”: “my * aching * head *** like * lumps”. Others aren’t so charming, such as the overly precious “the true lover”; or the language-poem,
“credo”, (“confection-crapping a true Vatican box full of chocolate liqueurs”) ending abysmally with “compared to liberian rebels gang rape is poetry too”. And although the Dutch poet Victor Schiferli observes in an introduction, “the question of Israel and the Occupied Territories is a constant thread through Nasr’s work”, there is only one poem dealing directly with the matter. In “the subhuman and his habitat”, Nasr bitterly recounts a Palestinian welcoming a guest with instructions on how to get through and around checkpoints – even as people in wheelchairs and cancer patients must, “because that’s the whole idea”.
However, the jewels in this collection are the operatic treatments of the lives and art of Dmitri Shostakovich (Stalin’s “holy fool”) and Willem Mengelberg (the “Boss” for fifty years over the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra). Each tried desperately to keep his art as the enduring and only truth, even in the face of cruel, ruthless regimes – Communism in Russia and Nazi occupation in Holland. Each poem is tuned and organized to the movements of major compositions: Shostakovich’s “Sonata for Viola, op. 147” (his last work before his death in 1975); and Gustav Mahler’s “Fourth Symphony”. Mengelberg worshipped Mahler, the Jew, and his music. He tried to protect the Jewish musicians in his orchestra, but finally acceded to the Nazi de-Judification of all art. Nasr has Mengelberg explain: “I am an artist/ and an artist must not/ get involved with politics”.These gorgeous poems do justice to the music. And what is poetry but the language form of human music?
210 BANIPAL 43 – CELEBRATING DENYS JOHNSON-DAVIES