Happy April!

The first section of Poems to Live By: In Troubling Times is called "In Troubling Times: Anxiety and Terror." The previous two poems I blogged about, "Nocturne" and "From the Frontier of Writing" were a part of this section also. Another poem from this section that I found particularly interesting, "Out in the Open (Part II) by Tomas Tranströmer," seems to speak of the evils of the modern world. The narrator is clearly from a foreign country and he is speaking of America as a distant land filled large, evil corporations. The narrator is praying for America and speaks of how the evil in America is different from that in his own country. "Over there evil and good actually have faces./ With us for the most part it's a fight between roots, numbers, shades of light." The narrator goes on to talk about an American office building and calls it"a mirror-like lake with no waves, turned on edge in the summer night. The narrator is pointing out the unnaturalness of America. We live in concrete cities and large corporations run the country. Here is a very brief biography of the poet: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/1112

The next poem is the most interesting in the book so far, in my opinion. It is "The Terrorist, He Watches" by Wisława Szymborska whose biography can be found here: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1996/szymborska-bio.html. Szymborska is known for using irony, paradox, contradiction, and understatement, a few of these found in this poem. The poem tells the story of a terrorist bombing in a bar. It details all the people who are coming and going from the bar, keeping track of them to see who will live and who will die. The whole poem seems very relaxed considering its nature, which is part of Szymborska's style of using understatement. This poem caught my attention immediately because I have always been slightly obsessed with wondering how differently events would turn out if people had made different decisions, in this poem, it's whether or not they come to or leave the bar. In my opinion, Szymborska has done a very good job with this poem. It stirs the mind, but refrains from being overdone like many poems. I think that in poetry, simpler is often better.