Description
Fiercely elegiac, the title poem of Paul Hoover's desolation : souvenir began as a filling in of the blank spaces in A Tomb for Anatole, Paul Auster's translation of Mallarme's grief-stricken notes for a poem that he never completed on the death of his ten-year-old son. However, Hoover's writing soon turned to his own consideration of life, death, the breaking of family relations, and loss of love as experienced by all of us: when death plays / with a child / it goes out nimble / comes back cold / life that traitor / aboard a razor boat. Written in three terse stanzas, each of the poem's 50 pages offers a phrase that becomes the title of its opposite number at the other end of the manuscript. The result is a haunting echoic effect that becomes especially rich as the phrases cross at the middle of the sequence. At times, the poem mourns the loss of the earth itself: what will be enough / when the earth / contains no one / will the harvest still be full and no bees in the hive, no hive /
