Flower of Anarchy: Selected Poems, The

Wieseltier, Meir. The Flower of Anarchy: Selected Poems. Translated by Shirley Kaufman, with the author. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003. 152 pp.

During the summer of 2004, at almost the same time, the national convention of the Republican Party was held in New York City, site of the 2001 World Trade Center attacks, and Muslims in France held mass demonstrations against the taking of French hostages in Baghdad-dissimilar events linked in a much more subtle way than their obvious connection to the American invasion. Both involved actions taken in the name of victims: at the convention, retribution for 9-11 became as much a focal point for George W. Bush's re-election campaign as it had earlier for his foreign policies, while the French protests decried the actions of those who an attempted to reverse the Chirac government's ban on religious garb in French school, especially the hijab, by threatening harm to their countrymen. The signs carried in Paris read "Not in My Name," even though a small percentage of Muslims in France probably sided with the kidnappers, just as surely as some (but certainly not all) of the September 11th victims reject (or would have, had they survived) the use of military force against civilian populations (intentionally or not) and even against armed opponents in both Afghanistan and Iraq. "Not in My Name" is the cry of the doubly victimized-injured by the hostility of enemies on some level, and then misrepresented or misused as an excuse for the reprisals of "friends." This is the point of Meir Wieseltier's poem, "Sonnet: Against Making Blood Speak Out," written at the time of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, when he says that, were he to die "by the bullet of a young killer [...] don't dare say / that my blood permits you to justify your wrongs." And Wieseltier dismisses extremists of all stripes in the final reversal of the sonnet, when he describes the convictions of those who would do violence to avenge his murder: "Terrible-the illusion of the Kingdom in obtuse hearts."

It is interesting, therefore, that Meir Wieseltier has long styled himself an apolitical poet. "I can't stand political poetry," he writes at the beginning of another lyric from the same period entitled "Pro & Con." But poetry, like politics, is on some level always local, especially in Wieseltier's locale, the State of Israel, to which he emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1949, so those unfamiliar with Israeli literature may be surprised to find how little the conflicts with Palestinians and neighboring Arab nations figure in The Flower of Anarchy, a selection from forty years of his verse translated by the fine English-language poet Shirley Kaufman. A good example of this is the poems chosen from a volume Wieseltier published in the heady period for Israelis between the 1967 and 1973 wars. Included are lyrics about friends, about death, about the world, about poetry itself. The city of Tel Aviv is captured in the snapshot-like images of one poem connected to Israeli Independence Day in 1972, and very differently in a long narrative about the sexual abuse of a boy. But only one poem in this section deals even indirectly with the wars and occupations, and in it Wieseltier imagines Saint-Exupéry's Little Prince inducted into the army, given "a submachine gun" and told to use it, "or it'll be your head instead. / That's how it is, little prince" (p. 38).

Some of Wieseltier's most haunting poems of this sort were written in the period following the 1973 war. In one, "The secret of Authority," the poet chides himself for simply emptying his "house of newspapers, /radios, television, all these/feeble striptease shows of social disgrace," but cannot avoid perceiving the endless cycle his people have entered upon: "I see the children turn into soldiers/and the girl soldiers turn into mothers/and the mothers weep and make their children into soldiers." The importance of reading Wieslatier's poems in context is made clear in another work from this period, entitled "Passengers," in which two men ride on the same bus as the narrator "into the Central Bus Station/where something horrendous would befall them." One thinks immediately of the frequent terrorist bombings of Israel's bus stations and market areas, but the fact that the poem is included in a section about the months prior to the 1973 war suggests rather different possibilities.

Wieseltier does revisit the Israeli political and military situation many times and from many vantages over the course of this volume, in poems such as "Jerusalem 3000," with its satiric portrait of Ehud Olmert, a former mayor of Jerusalem, and "On the Seventy-Three," about those killed when two Israeli army helicopters collided specifically, and about the human and other costs of Israel's decades-long occupation of southern Lebanon. But Israelis have never been as restricted in their concerns as the headline-delimited image of them in the rest of the world has it, and Wieseltier is at his best as a poet in works that take a less controversial and more personal look at the world. From images of "Tel Aviv weather on a winter night [...] like a woman shoved with her clothes on/into a bathtub," to a meditation on the similarities of Jewish kreplach to the dumplings eaten by Russians, Ukrainians, Mongolians, Chinese, and Japanese, Wieseltier makes art out of private visions and personal associations. References to the Hebrew bible are easily balanced by those to writers like Cummings, Shakespeare, and even Ezra Pound (who is told, "They hardly read you today, you know. / Pretty soon only Jews with remember you, /unfavorably"); and Paris landmarks are found almost as frequently in Wieseltier's verse as are those of Jerusalem. Indeed, being cosmopolitan as well as Jewish has long produced conflict for Wieseltier in reality, but also much of the greatness evident here in this volume, an excellent introduction to one of the leading Israeli poets from the first generation to come of age after the establishment of the state.