All Books

This arresting first collection is, in part, a delicately balanced look at Beirut from the perspective of a Westerner who lives and works in that remarkable city. Whether writing about the Middle East or about domestic life, Di Nardo refuses to romanticize; he doesn’t moralize about the causes of perennial conflicts. He is that rare thing: a clear-eyed witness.

Here and there Starbucks coffee cups collide
with service taxis and re-assign the chaos, litter
the brittle landscape of the coast, while the world
command picks through the sands of lawlessness
for just a grain of what remains of itself,
the little air of familiarity defunct, despised and fed
to those on foot like scraps to gutter cats in the shade
of too many parked cars that took the place
of date palms standing on the sidewalks.
Yet no one would ever leave their shift at the wheel,
or turn home in the grim belief life’s purpose is that unreal.
(from “Oh the streets of West Beirut”)

All Is Flesh collects in one volume Hugh Hazelton’s English translations of Yannick Renaud’s brilliant first two books of poems, Taxidermy and The Disappearance of Ideas, first published by Éditions Les Herbes rouges in Montreal.

Taxidermy is a discourse on time consisting of prose poems stretched to the very limits of detachment. A completely objectified couple, alternately speaking as simply “he” or “she,” strive to attain perfect control over their physical movements. Slowing them down, even stopping them, is equivalent in their minds to seizing and savouring the essence of the present and, by extension, to stopping time in their lives—an enactment of the romantic aesthetics of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Their attempts at “holding the pose,” as much for themselves as for each other, generate a tension in their voices—at once demanding, yearning and confessional—between the need for both static form and fluid movement in the choreography of their lives, which seeks to “occupy space unequivocally.”

The Disappearance of Ideas is a meditation on time that interrogates death and mourning, reminding us that “death remains the privilege of the living” and that “cathedrals tell us nothing more than the time on their stones.” Unsentimental and intellectualized, the poems generate their radiant intensity by drawing our attention to the part of mourning that remains unresolved and inaccessible in our memories, reminding us of “what we don’t know of stories.” But this absence, what remains unknown of the past to us, also haunts our futures, where “actions taken only hinder what should have been,” and “there is no second chance.” As Baudrillard has said: “Things live only on the basis of their disappearance, and, if one wishes to interpret them with entire lucidity, one must do so as a function of their disappearance.”