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colorado review 174 For all their precise craftsmanship, the poems in The Ms of M Y Kin reach beyond poetry as a genre to become a document that records and interprets history with inventive empathy. Janet Holmes makes the poems in this book an occasion to reclaim history and to write, with her sister Emily Dickinson, a challenge to readers to mark the danger that “Is / –opon the Soul / To go without / challenging Despair.” Scribe, by Norman Finkelstein Dos Madres Press, 2009 reviewed by Michael Heller The scribe was one of a learned class in ancient Israel, charged with teaching, copying manuscripts, studying Scripture, even performing a juridical function at times. The word for scribe in the New Testament, “soferim,” suggests a transgressive figure , referring to “book men” who differed with the teachings of Jesus. In a combinatory phrase found throughout the New Testament, the scribe is linked pejoratively with the Pharisees. Finkelstein’s beautiful new book (beautifully designed by Dos Madres) invokes all these senses of the term. In Finkelstein’s work, the scribal poet is both scholar and outlier, and his work is the product of both his deep knowledge of the subject and an ambiguous, sometimes distant relationship to the text he offers up. This scribal poetics lies at the center of Finkelstein’s poetry. It can be found in Restless Messengers (1992) and the recently published Passing Over (containing poems written about the time of Restless Messengers), works that echo with the language of biblical parables and Jewish lore and yet demur from any embrace of the theological imperative. In his three-volume procedurally oriented Track, narrative continuity and the lyric voice are disrupted by an exogamous set of mathematical constraints that give a kabbalistic air to the poem. That simultaneous participation and distance from the overt “subject” of his poetry, reveal the arc of Finkelstein’s poetics and its “history of renunciation ,” as he puts it in the title poem of Scribe. The poem, and ultimately the entire book, resolves and completes a movement 175 Book Notes of displacement that I think is the goal of Finkelstein’s career as a poet. In this poem, the scribe observes himself: There is no sign upon you but there are signs upon the doorposts amulets of silver shaped like a hand with letters upon the palm and fingers. The title poem can therefore be taken as a manifesto, though, given that the “you” is in the second voice, it produces the kind of complication that makes Finkelstein such a rewarding and yet difficult-to-pin-down poet. The scribe, as Finkelstein envisions him here, is not exactly a maker nor a figure expressive of a particular interiority. Rather his constant motion involves both emptying and recording, an attempt at placing himself in an ever-ready position to receive the messages of the world while in some way accounting for and even compensating for the dross of private experience. As he writes in “For Count Zero”: All this is quotation Even if it is not all quotation The aim is to transpose the energy of logos from self to the world, to arrive finally at the title poem’s last line of making “a scribe . . . into a scribe.” Scribe is divided into three sections: “Drones and Chants,” in which the poems I’ve just discussed appear; “Collages”; and “An Assembly.” As these titles suggest, Finkelstein intends to keep the impersonal, almost contingent quality of his poetry in the foreground. A certain mechanism is at work, both in the propulsive force of the drone that sweeps up the individual’s voice beyond its own concerns and in the discourse-breaking mechanisms of collage and assembling. The scribe stands outside . He becomes a recording or constructivist instrument led on to writing by forces and new-found juxtapositions that in a sense take him out of himself in an almost mystical aura of selfabnegation . The poetics of the work argue for an utter receptivity, the colorado review 176 scribe attendant on phenomena, and so deeply absorbed in his task that revelation comes about as a kind of inverse contraction of reality. It can be likened to something resembling an emptying out...

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