Gloria gets carsick on Mondays

So there I am in the big Barnes & Noble at Union Square, looking for a gift for my Couch Surfing host. Her neighbour Kate Light? Nothing. Her more famous neighbour Marilyn Hacker? Nothing. Really? As Marilyn told me years ago in London, poetry doesn’t travel well; the Atlantic is wide. But she’s a prominent New York poet, unavailable in one of her own city’s largest bookstores. Not only doesn’t travel well, doesn’t persist. For example, I cannot find for sale in England a collection of Charles Causley’s verse, though it was on the English Literature syllabus when I was in school.

Back to the shelves. Other prominent poets? Richard Howard – nah. Czeslaw Milosz – nothing. I must be missing something. These are prominent contemporary poets. The information desk confirms it. Sic transit gloria mundi

Zbigniew Herbert
Collected Poems
1956-1998

But a last, long shot gets a hit. They have something by Zbigniew Herbert. A mistake, perhaps: I had already looked. No, no: in the new books section. And there it is: Zbigniew Herbert: Collected Poems 1956-1998.

I started writing precocious poems when I was 11, but it was not until at 17 I saw Herbert’s poem “Elegy of Fortinbras” that I knew a poem could move me to tears. I devoured the 1968 Penguin collection, which laced itself into what I know of language, just as Shelley meant by Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. In the 1980s I stumbled across another collection in translation, Report From The Besieged City. Suddenly, a decade after his death, I have in my hands four or five times more than I have seen. A feast. I spent the flight back to London immersed in it.

I love the modesty and irony of his poems, the distrust of world systems, his insistence on the importance and the particularity of people and things. Long before John Gray, Herbert wrote about the world systems as secular religions and rued the neglect of what classical writers knew. The 21st century needs him as badly as his own did, and I’ll be reproducing some of his work here. Appropriately, the first is:

Why The Classics

1
in the fourth book of the Peloponnesian War
Thucydides tells among other things
the story of his unsuccessful expedition

among long speeches of chiefs
battles sieges plagues
dense net of intrigues of diplomatic endeavours
the episode is like a pin
in a forest

the Greek colony Amphipolis
fell into the hands of Brasidos
because Thucydides was late with relief

for this he paid his native city
with lifelong exile

exiles of all times
know what price that is

2
generals of the most recent wars
if a similar affair happens to them
whine on their knees before posterity
praise their heroism and innocence

they accuse their subordinates
envious colleagues
unfavourable winds

Thucydides says only
that he had seven ships
it was winter
and he sailed quickly

3
if art for its subject
will have a broken jar
a small broken soul
with a great self-pity

what will remain after us
will be like lovers’ weeping
in a small dirty hotel
when wallpaper dawns

from Zbigniew Herbert: Collected Poems 1956-1998