Thick of It by Ulrike Almut Sandig
Translated from the German Karen Leeder
96 pgs. | hc | 9780857425560 | $19.00

Review by Talia Franks

Thick of It by Ulrike Almut Sandig is a slender book of poetry, vibrantly translated from the original German into English by Karen Leeder. The poems are prefaced by a translator’s introduction that dives in to the life of the poet along with a chronicle of her past and present works, including a light analysis of the poems within the book. The introduction was in many ways as invigorating as the poems themselves, because it gave a shape and context to the book for which I otherwise would not have had a frame of reference. While the poems certainly hold up on their own, I appreciated having this primer to them, because I felt more prepared to dive in and give the text my full attention once I knew the source of the poetry and its history.

The poems themselves are separated into three sections. The first is a collection of poems that appear under “north,” followed by a single poem under “center of the world,” and finally a third section called “south.” In this way, the reader follows the poet on a journey throughout the poems, which each evoking a new emotion that varies on the themes of the collection, including disappearance, absence, language, communication, belonging, identity, and love. Even with such a rigid external structure, the poems within the “north” and “south” sections were allowed their own fluidity, giving them breathing room to explore in their own directions.

Each poem varied in exact format, but was characterized by the fact that the title of each poem was a bolded word or collection of words within the poem itself, rather than appearing at the top of the page. This allowed for a much more fluid experience while reading the poems, because it was only after reading the poem in its entirety and reflecting upon the bolded section that I was able to formulate a full concept of the meaning behind each poem.

I’ll admit that a large part of me struggled to stay focused while reading Thick of It because the poems often evoked emotions in me that caused my mind to wander, and thus it took me much longer to read this slim volume than it has to read comparable texts. There is a raw yet slightly distant emotion in each poem that begs introspection. This also made it a little hard to stay engaged with the book as a cohesive whole, because every poem set my thoughts on a tailspin, so even though I could read through it quickly, it took me months to grapple with each poem on an individual level. There are many with odd turns of phrase that are difficult to wrap one’s mind around, such as “you wrote yourself the poem of it,” which was the bolded line/title on page three. Other lines are as visceral as they are impactful, such as “language is a/ horse that foams at the mouth,” a line from the first poem of “south.”

As peculiar as some of these lines are, and as much as the poems did evoke a great deal of emotion and introspection, the poetry itself was ephemeral, and upon reflection does not stand out in particular from other poets I have read. That is not to call the poetry bad by any means—I greatly enjoyed reading the collection, but their impact stuck with me more than their actual content. After reading this book I was awash with reflection about interpersonal relationships, my state of being, and a manner of general unease about existence.

People who are looking to read poetry that will cause them to really sit down and think about the world and their place in it, looking to take a deep dive into the psyche and come out at the other end, may just find that Thick of It is exactly the book they need.

want now: you – drive into me
want to push to the edge, hang, you
haul all my: shale, scrape
it off from: the head, from the shoulders
to rootstock throat gravel: you split me
give me – as if severed – sharp
countours – fangs wolffian ridge
questions too – will i? –
i – take you to me
                                 balances I

The stacatto lines, broken by strange punctuation, expose themselves as duplicitious; the punctuation is superfluous, and yet it’s not. It’s a violation of the line, of the rules of grammar, but it forces a rhythm on the almost unwilling reader. It’s pleasurable and distressing simultaneously, mimetic of the poems. The I in the poem submits to the violence of the you, while exerting her own controlled violence over the reader, and the poem and ultimately her poetic body.

Like most “experimental” texts this work demands more of its reader, a different set of tools and strategies. It is a text that has been splayed wide open, disgorging multiple readings. This extract from the second poem could be read as describing what the poetry itself is doing:

     II

– percieve:     just at the opencuts: set free
furrow –          to stand, sense, to drift now am: pitching to you
                        through the: fissures [. . .]

[The bracketed ellipsis is mine.] Pay attention to the slippery shifts of meaning across and through the punctuation, the way caesura is inserted into the lines and creates tension with the phrases that follow the colons. Feel the tension that is created by the speeding up and slowing down of the lines, the gaps in meaning and thwarted grammatical expectations (the missing subject for “am” for example).

This is poetry that demands several readings, at least one of which must be aloud. When I teach poetry, I always ask that the students read the poems out loud, as well as to themselves, and if I suspect they have not done it we do it together. Great poetry creates sonic space on the page, and visual space in the voice, and the movement between these opens up new meanings. Traditionally, this happens behind the semantic content of the poem, but Beals’s rendering of Utler’s poetry prioritizes its lyric qualities. In engulf – enkindle, the poems hinge on sound and silence, on rhythm and breaking, with meaning following. Try listening to this without reading along, and see what kind of difference it makes.¹

XI

finally, startled from sleep, find:
the larynx deseeded is
hollowed: hands palpate,
it: fumbling, feathered, from
ribcage entwine themselves
deeper into the: reed swallow: light,
gurgling, darkly well, dimly
they: keel towards hulls towards hollows
weave: cavities, gorges of
stalks of fingers of (..)
so to speak: towards the bittern – neting place,
in the singing reed so it’s called – grow
entangled as – flotsam and jetsam – stitched
up to the: glottis rustling
almost trembling i hear you again: say
song you say song – what is: song

Kurt Beals is a genius. I can’t imagine how these translations could have come to be otherwise. He may have been working at an advantage; Germanic languages share many rhythm and sound paterns, two of the most impressive features of this translation. Still, the strangeness of these poems, which demand so much of the reader, must have demaned even more of Beals. To create this kind of complexity in translation is nothing short of stunning, an acheivment compounded by the shifting registers and pacing of the language.

This is an uncompromising work of brilliance on both Utler and Beals’ parts. It’s sharp and sexy, challenging and riviting and absolutely relentless. This is the poetry I’ve been waiting my whole life for.

¹ Here’s a recording Erica made of “Utler IX”:

The best source for info on German poet Anja Utler seems to be (which, for those of you into poetry of the experimental flavor, looks pretty awesome on the whole), which has this to say:

Her first volume of poetry, asfsagen, was published in 1999, followed by münden – entzügeln (engulf – enkindle) in 2004. The year before, she received her doctorate for her thesis on women Russian modernist poets.

That same year she was awarded the Leonce-und-Lena-Preis, an award devoted to outstanding younger poets. That award jury described her poetry as “sensual sound constructions, on paper as in recitation, without being pure sound-poetry. Rather, they are language games of psychological world perception, that out of the substance of their words create shafts of illumination through which our curiosity, but also our bafflement in the exploration of language, feel their way.”

Erica Mena is a member of the Best Translated Book Award poetry committee (quick interjection: ��Բ��ܱ���—e�԰쾱�Ի���� isn’t eligible for this year’s award, but come BTBA 2012 . . . ), who is also a poet, translator, and noted screeder.

But today, Erica is gushing rather than screeding . . . Based on the first paragraph alone, I think Erica kinda sorta likes this collection . . . (And be sure to scroll to the bottom to hear a recording Erica did of one of the poems):

engulf — enkindle is a stunning book of poetry. It literally stunned me into absolute submission; it is the book of poetry I’d been wanting to read for years. It’s a small volume, and I read it in one sitting, faster than I normally read poetry, because I couldn’t slow down. The language sunk its hooks into me and pulled me through the book, like rafting down rapids. If some of this sounds violent, that’s no mistake – the book is full of sensual violence, done to the body of language and the body in the poem.

want now: you – drive into me
want to push to the edge, hang, you
haul all my: shale, scrape
it off from: the head, from the shoulders
to rootstock throat gravel: you split me
give me – as if severed – sharp
countours – fangs wolffian ridge
questions too – will i? –
i – take you to me
                                 balances I

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