David Cooke, Collected Poems, Littoral Press 2023
David Cooke, single-handedly edits the online poetry magazine The High Window, whichis the only such journal I care to read, and indeed where I first encountered his work.
Collected Poems represents a lifetime’s work, and in it we see the full range of Cooke’s themes and interests. I find his nostalgia for a Catholicism, in which he cannot bring himself to believe, to be the most engaging aspect of his poetry. This is so profound and poetic as to constitute a kind of agnostic mysticism. (The poems we reprint in this issue are all of this sort.) The coda of his lost belief is the poem In the Middle of the Way, a dialogue with Dante, in which he draws a poignant contrast between the cold astronomies of his own secular sky and the constellations by which Dante guided the barque of his soul,
who, like him, find myself
in the middle way. It’s June again,
and the year charts a zodiac
that is for me a flimsy image.
A putative planet brought him comfort.
His science misconstrued it.
My northern sun presages only
yet another fizzled summer.
There are few fascinating glimpses of the havens of other faiths, as in the poem Boddhisattva,
Perched discreetly on his stand,
he seemed to float in mid-air . . .
who, having chosen
to walk the peopled way
had for the interim postponed
the perfect zero of his goal.
Cooke has engaged a number of other themes, among which the most notable are his memories of his father, particularly in his final decline, jazz music, and foreign travel—he gives us poetic sketches of quite a number of exotic cities, for example, this glimpse of Sri Lanka in his In the Peradeniya Gardens,
The gardens were the legacy of a marriage
that was now long over. Around the perimeter
fruit bats rode the thermals like prehistoric birds,
and the giant Java fig tree, its branches
propped, the sprawling system of its roots exposed,had risen up in chaos from its central lawn.
Born and raised in England to an Irish family, his love of the Irish land and people are a frequent theme, though always with an understandable underlying ache: they are his own, yet not entirely. Irony is baked into Cooke’s existential condition. But entirely Irish is his deep feeling for, and resonant mastery of, English.
I once spent a year in Ireland, and was astonished to discover the truly national appreciation of beautiful language, the everyday poetry of Irish speech. I heard a man in a sandwich shop complain that the ham slice on his bread was “thin as an autumn leaf.” My own speech took on an iridescence from such company, and so I recognized the experience related in Cooke’s his poem, Connacht,
till all our visits to country
cousins, whose lyric speech
made changelings of our tongues . . .
Another theme in Cooke’s writing is foreign languages, (he has mastered several) and he offers fascinating, even sensual, observations on their texture and character.
Cooke is a learned and sophisticated writer, with a wide and intriguing range of themes. The latest section of his book is concerned with the character of metals, ranging from their feel and appearance, the sound and source of their names, to pre-Socratic speculations on the nature of matter and the careers of various alchemists. One is never bored and always surprised by Cooke’s topics. His poetry is lucid, coherent, and meaningful, sometimes great, and never less than good. I read the 450 pages of his book twice, with unwavering interest.
Jill Hammer, The Moonstone Covenant, Ayin, 2024.
Set in an archipelago, a land of boats and bridges, Moonstone is a nation so devoted to books and knowledge it’s like a university which morphed into a city-state. As the bibliocentrism alone might suggest, this is a kind of Jewish Narnia. It’s an unusually good iteration of the fantasy adventure novel. The world-building is flawless, with elaborate, enchanting fancies on the Borges end of the spectrum. There are “cloaksmen” who act as bodyguards for Moonstone’s princelings; inkwells shaped like castles, a different color in each turret with a roof that unscrews; bridges with shops and shrines tucked under their arches; gondolas whose headlights are a single lamp hanging from their steeply curved prows; houses with “pillow nests” by the hearth, isles “where sea-sheep graze peacefully on wide beaches and in the shallows, munching riverweed,” hot air balloons, “pointed roofs, silver scaled like fish . . .” The architecture of Moonstone is as cozily and poetically quaint as an Art Nouveau spiral staircase.
At the center are four friends with special abilities, of whom the most intriguing is Istehar, of the Sha’an, a people with a dryad-like mystical affinity to trees, and to books, whose leaves are made from them. She explains,
In the same way I can listen to trees, I can listen to books, so long as they’re made of plant matter. But unlike the dense, slow songs of the trees, the voices of books are tree-consciousness mixed with human intentions: brighter and louder. Neither trees nor books tend to use the kind of speech one gets in a conversation: usually, it’s more like a jumble of feelings and images. But still, I can size up an author’s intention without even touching the cover. It’s unfair, Annlynn says, that I can read books without opening them. A Librarian could use such a gift, she says. But this talent appears only rarely even among my people, who lived among the great trees of the Sha’an forest for generations — until a despot drove us out so he could own the trees himself, and cut them down at will.
Istehar’s people, a dream version of the Jews, have been driven from their forest land and find precarious refuge in urban Moonstone. Their religion, almost outlawed there, is thought to verge on sorcery, and its practitioners are called “witches” as a term of abuse.
The other characters are: Annlynn, a tough-talking sword-wielding warrior librarian; Olloise, a science-minded woman who follows her father’s profession of forensic apothecary; and Vasmine, a courtesan who turned ink-merchant when she bought out her contract. The four friends are of course aspects of the author’s own personality, a device familiar from the Oz books, The Journey to the West and The Brothers Karamozov. It’s an excellent trope, one which affords the reflective reader a hologram portrait of the author.
A well-realized detective story set in a political drama, the book exceeds expectation by its taut plot and splendid writing. The multiple actors and complex actions are clearly defined, so one never has to puzzle over who’s who or why something now happens. An unusual feat for a first novel!
The only clue that this is a first effort is perhaps the textbook perfection of its structures. From the map and cast of characters in the front to the notes on the history and sociology of the various peoples in the appendix, and everything in between, The Moonstone Covenant is scrupulously genre-correct.
And rather more. The songs, spells and prayers cited from time to time are respectably poetic—a feat I haven’t seen achieved since Tolkien. The names of the characters and places are refreshingly non-annoying. Again, as in Tolkien, they have sufficient historical resonance to be evocative, while both avoiding inept direct references (as in Dune) or uncouth nonsense names. It is with an agreeable sense of being in on the secret that one parses, for example, Istehar as Ishtar and Olloise as Heloise, and notes the aptness of the names’ respective and appropriate goddess and medieval resonance.
This is a gynocentric novel of the sort that has been in the repertory since Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Mists of Avalon. The women characters are all powerful and fascinating, the male ones, for the most part, malicious and marginal.
The feminist mono-gender adventure genre arose as a symmetrical reply to the stories for boys pioneered by Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson. Those all-boy adventure yarns were a (what else?) puerile literary response to the “new woman” and the suffragettes. It was a rear-guard action from a masculinity that perceived itself as embattled—and one with (via Stevenson) a homophile subtext.
It is then well within the tradition that this girl-power ripping yarn is also a lesbian novel The four female friends at its center are linked in a group marriage—placing their romantic quartet squarely in the now fashionable genre of gender-nonconforming fantasy romance. The erotic scenes are handled with understated good taste: unambiguous but not explicit. This gay relationship is tolerated, with some distaste, by the society around them, and thus the theme of intolerance is addressed here with maturity and restraint—as it is with persecution of the Sha’an, which echoes that of the Jews.
Indeed, the most distinctive thing about this book is its Jewish subtext. Published by Ayin, the hippie contingent of the Jewish literary press, it has deeply semitic religious resonances. One expects no less from Hammer, who founded an institute for the ordination of Hebrew Priestesses.
There hasn’t been any dearth of Jewish themed SF and Fantasy, but this has drawn almost exclusively on the gnostic mythology of the Kabbalah, and such features of Eastern European Jewish folklore as the Dybbuk and the Golem.
Hammer’s fantasy takes the audacious step of mythologizing Jewish history itself, in her account of the Sha’an, the indigenous people of the wilderness north of Moonstone. Here we should especially note the poetry of the depiction. The Sha’an’s is a “religion of the book”—but one that evolves necessarily from the landscape. The paragraph on their faith from the appendix is an able summary,
The Silvilline religion arose in the Sha’an forest and is practiced by Sha’an folk and descendants of that region, and some converts. The core of Silvilline religion is belief in the Tree of Life, an energy that unites all beings. Silvillines believe all things are alive, including the stones and the earth, and have a particular reverence for trees as their allies. Their clergy are called illuminatrix (or, sometimes illuminator, though their clergy are mostly female) and are channels for the messages of trees and the memories of the tribe.
This earth-based religion is synthesized with the largely literary existence of a people in exile, by a mythology of books. Hammer gives us a number of tantalizing glimpses into the Sha’an book religion, as in this account of Istehar’s
. . . Book of the Tree with its cover of soft bark, the first she ever made. It was her parents’ treasure; they kept it in the little ark in the main room of their underground home, and took it out only when the illuminatrix came to visit, when there was a birth or death or marriage to remember. They revered it, though it was the work of her clumsy hands. She remembers pleading for a clump of escaping villagers to wait while she ran to fetch it. Now it reminds her of the tender skin of the willow and silversilk trees she knew as a child.
The placement of the book in an ark makes equation with a Torah scroll unambiguous, (as does the word “Covenant” in the book’s title) while the underground home places the family’s ritual life among the root-mysteries of nature itself.
A later account of the Books gives this eye-opening description,
When we fled, we took the air in our lungs. We took herbs, roots, and flowers in our medicine boxes. We took staffs and bows made from branches gifted us by wind and rain. We took cups and bowls carved from burls. We took children on our backs, with wilted wreaths on their heads and seeds in their pockets. In a sack, I carried our Books of the Tree. The forest came with us; it shelters us still. But this city will never understand that.
I will never forget the first time a Librarian opened a Book of the Tree to see what was in it. It was not long after our miserable arrival, when we were all penned at a checkpoint in the Vexriver Fortress south of the city. Such a shiver passed through the man when he opened the cover of rough, ridged, and furrowed bark, and saw the thousand carefully handmade pages were blank. He turned page after page but could make out no writing, no language at all. I think the city’s hatred of the Sha’an was born in that moment.
“If you produce books like this, you’ll be begging on the streets in no time,” he said.
“Books like this are how we survived this long,” I told him.
The seemingly blank book has several levels of meaning. It reflects Hebrew writing itself, incomprehensible and thus a “blank,” a source of fear and suspicion to the Hebrews’ hosts in exile. There is also a suggestion that the book’s mysteries are ineffable, expressible only by silence.
In this context, the account of the armies of Titus ravaging the Second Temple is relevant. When the Romans approached its inmost shrine, they saw before them the veil of the sanctuary, an immense black tapestry figuring the night sky. Beyond it, the Holy of Holies, which no man might enter except the High Priest, once a year, on the Day of Atonement—the sanctuary whose contents were one of the mysteries of the ancient world.
The symbolism was clear: behind this enormous veil, which, when seen up close, filled the eyes like the actual night sky, was the meaning of the cosmos. The sanctuary was opened: the huge room was entirely empty. The Romans, placed their standards in the center and sacrificed to them. Perhaps they were appalled at the Zen paradox of the empty shrine. More likely, it was wasted on them.
But, like the blank pages of Hammer’s Book of the Tree, it should not be wasted on us. The austere and absolute Jewish formulation of Deity, as beyond depiction—a God whose name is famously impossible to even utter—is suggested by Hammer, with her unwritten pages, and the baffled customs official, in a manner at once witty and artistic.
It is also notable that the Tree of Life here is free of the usual Kabbalistic gloom. The Kaballah, a dark gnostic novel, where Woman is as usual seen as irredeemably “other,” and described with the usual saint-whore contrast between the Shekhina (pure and suffering like Desdemona) and Lilith (cruelly erotic like Lady Macbeth). While the glimmering Shekhina totters alongside the Jews in their exile, Lilith roosts in the Tree of Life like a metaphysical owl on the bough of a gigantic haunted vegetable.
Hammer sidesteps the Tree archetype’s tainted heritage, by the profundity of her insight into Nature, which she reveals with giddy-making suddenness in this passage describing Istehar’s mystical communion with the forest.
And then, as I am mid-thought, the forest comes: unfathomable roots twining underground, interlocking branches veiling the sky. It is all around me: the green effusion of the leaves, the guardianship of bark, the murmur of communities of branches. They are here, as if they never burned at all. Vasmine and Princess Kalicent have vanished behind tree trunks. The great trees lean toward me, and I feel myself dissolving, as if I am a fallen log about to be swallowed up by moss and mushrooms and little saplings.
Nature mysticism is almost a given in Fantasy literature, due to the genre’s luddite withdrawal from the modern world into a medieval good old never-was. Tolkien’s nature spirits, Tom Bombadil, and the Ents, are the touchstone for quality here. But how tinny his sunlit profundities sound beside these deep-ringing Hammer-strokes! This sensation of “dissolving” and being “swallowed” by nature is a particularly female insight into physical existence—a quality of vision which Camille Paglia called “the blurring of feminine sfumato.”
Paglia has that special dread of the organic, fertile world, which only an academic trans male can manage. Discussing Edmund Spenser’s arch-witch, she writes that Acrasia’s realm, “The Bower of Bliss,” is “the chthonian swamp, the matrix of liquid nature. It is inert and opaque, slippery with onanistic spillage.”
What Tolkein glimpses from an idealizing sunlit distance, and Paglia sees as a mire of sticky immanence, Hammer experiences with religious ecstasy, drawing plausible power from her identification with nature.
Hammer’s fantasy novel offers, a number of subtly expressed and authentic spiritual insights. The blank pages of the Silvilline scriptures are a poetic meditation on the imageless mysticism of the Jews, while the Silvilline “Great Tree” meaningfully redeems the central myth of the Kabbalah into ecologically sensitive reality. There is more, too much to fit into a review.
Our world, which industry and science make less recognizable by the decade, necessitates a spiritual age of exploration. More valuable hints and leads may often be gleaned from poems and fantasy novels than from sermons or scholarly articles, and Hammer’s choice of genre fiction as the vehicle for her wisdom cannot be too warmly applauded. She has not simply served up another helping of dybbuks, golems and magic rabbis, the warmed-up the leftovers of Eastern European folklore. Instead she has excavated profound and structural Jewish archetypes. Archetypal forms are not uncommon in fantasy literature:, Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, for example, traces a classic labyrinth. But to use the archetypes with precision of purpose, infusing ancient symbols with new meaning, as Hammer has here with her Tree of Life whose leaves are pages veined with writing from no man’s hand, is a significant spiritual achievement.
Jonathan Freedman, The Jewish Decadence Jews and the Aesthetics of Modernity, The University of Chicago Press 2021.
This is a breezy, entertaining, surprising book about the Jewish involvement in fin de siècle culture. The main points of interests are the tracing of the Semitic rendition of the “fatal woman” Salome, from Sarah Bernhardt to Betty Boop; Jewish poster-boys for homosexuality such as Marcel Proust; and the Jewish taste for Schopenhauer, who Freud (who despised philosophy) invoked to give credibility to his theory of the “death instinct.”
Freedman makes the important point that Jews were viewed as personifying as well as purveying the tainted dainties of the decadent imagination. Well and sometimes startlingly illustrated, this is indeed a labor of love by an author with encyclopedic knowledge—his previous book dealt in depth with klezmer music, and assimilation. Gossipy, anecdotal and fun, the book is as full of goodies as a Christmas fruitcake.
As for the overall thesis, that Jews were in some ways, via their involvement in decadence, a catalyst of modernism, this aligns with the facts—a little misleadingly. Jews were disproportionately involved in the decadence, as they were in all advanced intellectual movements. Freedman goes on to makes the interesting point that Decadence was assuredly a bridge by which Europe crossed from 19th century aesthetic certainties to 20th century artistic experiments.
The only real criticism one could level at this gossipy, entertaining account is that the author at times overthinks his position. This is essentially a book about pop culture. It’s fun to bring the intellectual big guns to bear on trivia, since the results are often both winsome and amusing. Pope’s Rape of the Lock is the parade example of this approach; Paglia’s Sexual Personae is perhaps the most risqué recent iteration. But the price of such unexpected perspectives is a certain amount of distortion, as in a nature documentary where a gnat fills the screen like Godzilla.