Samuel Menashe: New and Selected Poems, edited by Christopher Ricks
by Robin Ekiss

from The Southern Review, Spring 2008

Though widely admired in England and Ireland over the last forty years—and embraced by poets as diverse as Billy Collins and Stephen Spender—at eighty-two, New York poet Samuel Menashe has always faced difficulty placing his work with American publishers. In 2004 he was named the first "Neglected Master" by the Poetry Foundation, which arranged the publication the next year of a volume of new and selected poems published by the Library of America. As if to demonstrate the extent of his neglect, the New York Times misspelled his name in the caption beneath his photo in its announcement of the award. Menashe has since weathered both his status as a "neglected master" (which some saw as a kiss-and-kick compliment) as well as the Times's error, and his work has stood the test.

Menashe's poems are an object lesson in concision: disarmingly small, but rarely slight. Right from the start, it's obvious there's something unique about the quality of his work, as in the book's first poem, "Voyage":

Water opens without end
At the bow of the ship
Rising to descend
Away from it

Days become one
I am who I was

The appealing simplicity of rhyme, rhythmic resistence of each line, and unsentimental suggestiveness in "Voyage" are hallmarks of Menashe's style. His poems often read like koans, riddles that focus the mind. Terse, tense, and compressed, they still manage to make space for contemplation. Take, for example, one of his more well-known poems, "The Niche":

The niche narrows
Hones one thin
Until his bones
Disclose him

Here as elsewhere, the dimunition of self is a theme. Throughout the book, in lines that are at once ambiguous and clear ("I was where I am," "I am where I go," or "I am who I was"), Menashe argues against (or in favor of) his own invisibility.

If you love Emily Dickinson or Kay Ryan, you'll like Samuel Menashe. Neither as idiomatic as Dickinson nor as patently clever as Ryan, Menashe's poems possess a similar gem-like quality: polished, thought provoking, spiritual, and sly. He achieves what editor Christopher Ricks calls "the teasing of levity against gravity." At their best, the poems are wryly knowing, as in "Inklings," whose title belies the depth of the speaker's frustration:

Inklings sans ink
Cling to the dry
Point of the pen
Whose stem I mouth
Not knowing when
The truth will out

Menashe's light touch shouldn't be mistaken for light verse, though. Characteristic of his mordant wit is a poem inspired by a visit to the family plot:

When I was ten
My grandmother died
She was fifty-seven
I am fifty-five

When faced with one's mortality, what more is there to say?

That other Samuel (Coleridge), in his longest poem, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," sang the praises of "All things both great and small," while Menashe's untitled "rime" may be one of the shortest paeans ever to the passage of time:

Pity us
By the sea
On the sands
So briefly

Such straightforward eagerness is not without shortcomings (if you'll excuse the pun). There are poems here whose sentiment outstrips the language, or whose naiveté is merely sweet, as in the poem "Star-Crossed":

This lunar air
Draws me to you,
The moon's magnet
Aligns that pair
Whom dragons slew,
Whose course was set
Before they knew

A word as markedly archaic as "slew" (even in the company of dragons) feels forced, and the rhyme manhandled. Menashe may be making fun of his own overt romanticism here, but that doesn't excuse the poem's fancy. Likewise, there are witticisms that can seem silly: for instance, "A pot poured out / Fulfills its spout." Still, it's hard to fault a poet for his sense of humor, especially when it's so integral to his voice.

Ultimately, though, these moments are far outweighed by the genuineness of Menashe's vision, as when his poems drop their guard and become unflinchingly personal, as in "Morning":

I wake and the sky
Is there, intact
The paper is white
The ink is black
My charmed life
Harms no one—No wife, no son

The elemental plainness of regret in such a poem is almost too much for such short lines to bear.

By his own admission, Menashe didn't want to be a poet. ("I just did not aspire to that exalted state," he writes in his introduction to the book.) His poems carry some of the force of that reverence and that reticence.

Some readers have argued that the work should have remained "neglected." One irate blogger went so far as to call Menashe a "hack," whose efforts are "as inspired as the classroom assignments of a stoned middle-schooler." Truth be told, the work collected here can be uneven. But even unevenness can be a virtue; great poems risk great failure, and that's no small feat.

About the Author
Robin Ekiss has poems in recent or upcoming issues of Atlantic Monthly, TriQuarterly, and APR. Last year she received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award for emerging women writers.

The Southern Review
Louisiana State University

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