The Arrival »

DANIEL SIMKO was born in Czechoslovakia and came to this country shortly after the events of 1968. He is the translator of Autumn Sonata by Georg Trakl, which won the Poets' House Translation Award in 1988. In 1989-90 he held a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, and was a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

Poet and translator Daniel Simko emigrated with his parents to the U.S.A. and lived here until his death, aged 45, in 2004. Steeped in the traditions of European art, Simko remained reticent about publishing. Thanks to his literary executor, Carolyn Forche, this first collection, in the language Simko grew up into, showcases his gift for the unexpected, exact phrase. The Arrival maps a haunting choreography of travel, memory, and the body so gently you will feel you have been carrying this book around with you all along.

Publishers Weekly

Simko's posthumous English-language debut is a long-awaited event for those who have known about his haunting poems. Simko was born in Czechoslovakia in 1969 and moved to the U.S. after the Soviet invasion of the country in the late '60s. He lived much of his life in New York—writing, participating in the literary scene, and translating an acclaimed volume of the poems of Georg Trakl—and died in 2004. Now, his executor, the poet Carolyn Forche, has shepherded his poems, which he was reluctant to publish in his lifetime, into print. Like Charles Simic, though devoid of Simic's playful humor, Simko's poetry has as its backdrop a hazy, surreal sense of life in a war-torn Eastern European landscape: “I have mentioned fists, and departures,/ the dumb choreography of the blind.” These poems are fragmentary but always sharp, their emotional weight clear. Simko probes the self, looking through pinholes for glimpses of other people: “I wake up/ and you come/ with a shawl/ black with stars.” And, like Frank Stanford, another poet whose influence has spread posthumously, Simko writes with haunting precision about death: “I am entering you the way an angel enters a scythe.” This book will be a bittersweet discovery to many who will wish this poet had more time. (Nov.)

Contents

Introduction....................i
Departures....................3
Winter Music....................4
Homage to Georg Trakl....................5
January....................7
Still Life: A Treatment....................8
Deposition....................9
Far....................10
Coda....................11
At 4 a.m....................12
Against Our Forgetting....................13
Three Songs....................18
The Room....................20
Imagining a Sister....................21
Mythology / From the Fragments....................22
Resolution....................23
Dust....................24
A Late Awakening....................26
The Arrival....................27
Nocturne....................28
To Max Jacob in the Blue....................29
A Poem in Your Name....................31
The Lesson....................33
Thinking of My Father / On a Bus to Baltimore....................34
The Suicide....................35
Prayer....................36
Duet after Rain....................37
The Jewish Cemetery in Prague....................38
A Meditation on Lines by Sándor Csoóri....................39
Gavrilo Princip Thinks of His Highness....................40
Coming Home....................41
A Field of Red Poppies....................42
René Char....................43
Answer....................44
Afterwards....................45
From the Bestiary....................46
Lament....................53
Autumn 1979, Brooklyn....................55
A Photograph of Us....................56
Romanza Andaluza....................57
Thinking about a Holocaust Victim....................59
The Tribes....................60
Requiem....................62
Thoughts for the Fire....................64
A Small Ceremony....................65
Ballade....................67
Pavese, a Departure, a Romance....................69
A Fragment after Robert Desnos....................70
A Little Music....................72
Demonology....................73
December 1992....................74
Proverbs (of the Seas?)....................75
The World Within a Lost Glove....................76
Untitled Fragment....................77
Notes....................78
Bread for Another Day....................79
Your Sleep, Endymion....................80
A Dream of My Death....................82
The Hand....................84