“Trepanned,” “Grief,” and “Never over the nearly over” by Eva Salzman appeared in Issue 43 and can be found here.
We’d love to hear a little more about this set of poetry.
The poem “Trepanned” came out of an essay in an anthology of English eccentrics I came across, when teaching a residential course, deep in the English countryside. I threw the topic at students and everybody ignored me except me. Months later the topic surfaced unbidden, to serve a poem nothing to do with trepanning. Kind of. The poem “Grief” is too layered to explain easily here and “Not over the nearly over” tries to venture into cosmos where the living are limited to visiting hours only, standing room in the outskirts, a small waiting area from which can be glimpsed a vastness of the glorious and terrifying.
What was the most difficult aspect in writing these poems?
Competent mediocrity is something I fear. Form isn’t terribly hard to accomplish but doing it well is fiendishly hard. Still, I agonise over every word. Frost’s criteria, “No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader…” guided me before I’d ever read his famous epigram.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
I’m going to break your question’s criteria in every imaginable way. (My answers rarely suffer from singularity, perhaps because I’m a twin.) These days, I’m also a broken record recommending The Island at the Center of the World by Russell Shorto about early Dutch NYC. Recently, I read for the first time Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome, and soon afterwards came across another writer, also a Wharton fan, who said she hated the book, leaving me to wonder if I have lousy taste. The first half of Alice Carriere’s memoir Everything/Nothing/Someone is stylistically intriguing. I laughed recently at a reading by Jason Koo but have not yet read his poems on the page. American readers wanting a British fairly new poet might try Emily Berry.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
The drinks already enjoyed with Sharon Olds and Margaret Atwood require a rematch. Questions to the latter would arise from our now actually living The Handmaid’s Tale. Sharon’s permanently poetic manner of colloquial conversation has long fascinated me.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
Inner wailing commences here as I consider what is a massive pile of undone things and the diminishing time left to finish them. I’m editing books of writings by my composer/birdwatcher father Eric Salzman and the poet Sarah Hannah, who shouldn’t have died so young and whom I loved. There are unfinished novels, short stories, essays and features, or ideas for same, plus musical collaborations. The next poetry collection is around half finished. Thankfully, my editor has given up asking about this. Craig Raine, when he was poetry editor at Faber, forbade his writers from turning out a next book within 5 years, a consoling principle and a sensible one too, in my view.
Our thanks to Eva for taking the time to answer a few questions and share these poems. Read “Trepanned,” “Grief,” and “Never over the nearly over” here.
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Co-editor of the acclaimed anthology Women’s Work: Modern Women Poets Writing in English (Seren). Eva Salzman’s books include Double Crossing: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe) and Bargain with the Watchman (Oxford University Press). Her poetry, fiction and non-fiction have been widely broadcast on BBC radio, translated internationally and have appeared in publications such as the New Yorker, Kenyon Review and Ploughshares in the USA and, in the UK, in the Guardian and Independent newspapers as well as Granta, TLS, Poetry Review, Spectator, Dark Horse and Poetry Birmingham. Her libretti and lyrics, written for composers and singers Christine Tobin and Gary Carpenter, as well her composer father Eric Salzman, have been performed in Europe, NYC and at Buxton Opera Festival in the UK, and have appeared on CDs. Born and raised in NYC, and a dual citizen, Eva divides her time between USA and London, where she lectures at Goldsmiths University of London.