Swallows and Waves

by Paula Bohince

Overview

Seated one, loved by the lavishing comb and fingers of another woman demon-
strating how attention and technique coalesce into art. Where to go when the mother is gone.
All occupations form to replace her.
What relief to be a girl again for an hour,
beneath the practiced wrists of her avatar.

Paula Bohince is the author of The Children and Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Poetry, Granta, the Nation, and elsewhere.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781941411155
Publisher:	Sarabande Books
Publication date:	01/12/2016
Pages:	72
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.70(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Paula Bohince is the author of The Children and Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Poetry, Granta, and elsewhere. She has received prizes from the Poetry Society of America and the UK National Poetry Competition, as well as the “Discovery”/The Nation Award.

Table of Contents

A Woman Coming from under the Mosquito Netting and Lighting Her Pipe at the Wick of a Lantern 1

Rooster and Hen before Hydrangeas 2

Lover Taking Leave of a Courtesan 3

Hibiscus and Korean Nightingale 4

Tiger Licking Its Leg 5

Hairdresser 6

Tiger and Dragon 7

Two Women, One Seated on a Bench Smoking a Pipe and Another Holding a Fan, under the Light of the Crescent Moon 8

Sparrows and Camellia 9

Riverboat Party 10

An Eagle Attacking a Monkey under a Pine Tree 11

Girl Playing Samisen 12

Peacock 13

Sudden Rain on Mt, Tempo 14

Bamboo and Poppies 15

Maples 16

Swallows and Waves 17

Young Samurai on Horseback 18

The Love Letter 19

Descending Geese at Katada 20

Horses Romping on the Beach 21

The Poet Li Po Admiring a Waterfall 22

Carp Lured by Fallen Cherry Blossom Petals 23

Woman Tearing a Love Letter 24

Butterflies 25

The Insistent Lover 26

Golden Pheasant and Peonies 27

Courtesan with Her Attendant 28

Crickets, Cage, and Flowers 29

Firefly-Catching 30

Bullock with Puppy 31

Crows 32

Beauty with Cat 33

Irises and Grasshopper 34

Girl with Ox 35

The Bow Moon 36

Owl 37

Rabbits and Crows in the Night Snow 38

Rabbits in Grass under the Moon 39

Willow and Egret 40

Long-Tailed Blue Bird Flying over Azalea Blossoms 41

Mountain and River on the Kiso Road 42

Mandarin Ducks and Snow-Covered Reeds 43

Monkey and Wasp 44

Cranes and Pines 45

Blossoming Plum in Mist and in Snow 46

South Wind at Clear Dawn 47

Lovers in the Snow 48

Peach Blossom Spring 49

Young Man with Hawk 50

Two Beauties Leading a Horse 51

Grasshopper and Gourd Vine 52

Deer and Poems 53

Boy Dancing with a Hobby-Horse 54

Chrysanthemums at Night 55

The Kegon Falls 56

Three Women under a Flowering Cherry Tree 57

Bullfinch on a Branch of Weeping Cherry 58

A Mother Dressing Her Son in a Kimono 59

Lotus and Willow in Moonlight 60

Sources

Acknowledgments

The Author

Editorial Reviews

01/18/2016
In her third collection, Bohince (The Children) draws inspiration from artwork done during Japan’s Edo period (1603–1868) to craft poems that deceive through their spare appearance. Each of the poems, none longer than 15 lines, works as both a rendering and an interpretation. The titles of the paintings feel mundane—“Golden Pheasant and Peonies,” “Rabbits and Crows in the Night Snow”—but Bohince’s quiet revelations shed a strange, sometimes painful light on what seems familiar. In “South Wind at Clear Dawn,” she likens an image of “stiff and untouchable” wind blowing through pines to a wife at her husband’s funeral. Though some descriptions feel expected (a “sumptuous kimono,” and an abyss that “whispers”), the ultimate effect of the simplicity is cumulative. The reader is lulled into hypnosis, barely removed from the artwork by the fact of the book. Rarely does one find a collection wherein the speaker seems almost unaware, or at least unconcerned about, the reader’s presence. These poems are intensely private, reflecting the quiet of the image being studied as well as the speaker studying it. Delicacy and agony have the same resonance, as in “Hairdresser,” when she writes “Where to go/ when the mother is gone./ All occupations form to replace her.” Bohince offers a discreet, surprising kind of ekphrasis. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

One of Eight Notable Titles for 2016, Pittsburgh City Paper

"There’s movement in Bohince’s ­poems, but it’s gradual and subtle — an eye passing like Ken Burns’s camera over a still image, discovering new details."
—New York Times Book Review

"This collection of evocative poems brings to life a world long gone but resonant with our own. Each finely wrought poem reveals hidden depths upon rereading. One not to miss."
—Library Journal, starred review

"Bohince’s quiet revelations shed a strange, sometimes painful light on what seems familiar. . . . Bohince offers a discreet, surprising kind of ekphrasis."
—Publishers Weekly

"Ekphrasis seems too sharp a word. . . to describe the silky music of these elegantly balanced poems. . . . Many Western poets, from Ezra Pound to Gary Synder, have been hopelessly in love with Japanese culture and its exotic erotics, but Bohince joins the very best of writers who slide open the screens, fully aware there are other screens still concealing our deepest pleasures and pains.”
—The Harvard Review

"A collection of surprising, almost concrete, coherence. The poems are invariably short; some vignettes are quickly sketched as if in watercolor, others more finely engraved; some poems hide a narrative, others an emotion. But most striking is that while the array of images is vast, they are tied together by a similar, stylistic sensibility."
—Asian Review of Books

"Lithe and exacting, this collection draws inspiration from old Japanese woodblock prints and scroll paintings, resulting in lines at once visual and isolating."
—Foreword Reviews, "The Best Poetry of Winter 2016"

“Paula Bohince has written a series of exquisite ekphrastic miniatures based upon Japanese scroll paintings and woodblocks of the Edo period . . . Compressed and delicately shaded, the words of these poems are treated as pigments, applied sometimes in daubs of pure verbal color, sometimes in fine washes that simulate transparency.”
—“Immortal Hand or Eye” by Jamie James, Parnassus: Poetry in Review

"Each scroll and print is a scene, and from each Bohince designs a narrative, her lines heavy with precise detail, distinct motions, bare truths, and subtle wishes.  Remote yet highly intimate, Swallows and Waves walks a neat path between secret and revelation.” 
—The Cincinnati Review

"In these emotionally restrained lyrics, Bohince adeptly observes her own feelings as she sees them reflected in the Japanese scrolls she describes. These poems bear rereading in order to allow their delicate subtleties, like reflections on a still pond, to emerge."
—The Hopkins Review, "The Ekphrastic Moment," print and online

"[Bohince] has a knack for startling lyricism and unusual images. . . . Bohince's notebook of green observations and red feelings has yielded a collection of deeply sensuous poems—poems that ask us to look at the world anew."
—The Hudson Review

"Paula Bohince’s empathic lyrics based on Japanese scroll paintings and wood prints demonstrate 'how attention and technique coalesce / into art.' She has written a carefully made, elegantly poised, and deeply humane book of poems.
—Edward Hirsch

"Paula Bohince’s renderings of brilliantly particular Japanese woodcuts and paintings in Swallows and Waves both honor and extend their precipitating subjects. Mind­play, word­play, and world­play combine in these consummate ekphrastic poems, offering–just as the original artworks do, but in a vocabulary unmistakably Bohince’s own–glimpses of life as it always exists: inside action, moment, and the implausible, multiply­layered silks, pelts, and feathers of felt existence."
—Jane Hirshfield

From the Publisher

★ 11/15/2015
Inspired by scroll paintings and woodblock prints from Japan's Edo period, this fine gathering of short poems—Bohince's third collection after The Children—celebrates nature and court society. Ekphrastic poems set mostly at night, they often feature courtesans—"The stilled gold bell/ of his lovely body rang and rang until wrung"—and the poet succeeds in capturing the thingness of things. In "Tiger Licking Its Leg," for instance, she focuses on the tiger's "Three-petaled pink of tongue. Un-kissed/ perhaps since cubhood." She also describes the hazards of paying deep attention, "What is looked at too long/ reddens: blush of attention. Blood-kissed,/ audacious as sin." With each poem, Bohince first sets the scene through vivid description, then shows how nature parallels human lives. In the title poem, she says, "The sea/ has no shore. All middle,/ dense as middle age." Many of the poems dissect and examine the idea of love, viewing it from odd angles, as in "A Mother Dresses Her Son in a Kimono." "Her breasts/ retreat back to ornament. The romance of their first/ year together, milky nights in bed, quietly ends." VERDICT This collection of evocative poems brings to life a world long gone but resonant with our own. Each finely wrought poem reveals hidden depths upon rereading. One not to miss.—Doris Lynch, Monroe Cty. P.L., Bloomington, IN

Library Journal