The Unstill Ones
Poems
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
An exciting debut collection of original poems and translations from Old English
An exciting debut collection of original poems and translations from Old English, The Unstill Ones takes readers into a timeless, shadow-filled world where new poems sound ancient, and ancient poems sound new. Award-winning scholar-poet Miller Oberman’s startlingly fresh translations of well-known and less familiar Old English poems often move between archaic and contemporary diction, while his original poems frequently draw on a compressed, tactile Old English lexicon and the powerful formal qualities of medieval verse.
Shaped by Oberman’s scholarly training in poetry, medieval language, translation, and queer theory, these remarkable poems explore sites of damage and transformation, both new and ancient. “Wulf and Eadwacer,” a radical new translation of a thousand-year-old lyric, merges scholarly practice with a queer- and feminist-inspired rendering, while original poems such as “On Trans” draw lyrical connections between multiple processes of change and boundary crossing, from translation to transgender identity. Richly combining scholarly rigor, a finely tuned contemporary aesthetic, and an inventiveness that springs from a deep knowledge of the earliest forms of English, The Unstill Ones marks the emergence of a major new voice in poetry.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
True to its title, Oberman's stirring debut begins in movement: "He was riding in the dark/ down a burned mountain." That motion defines both an otherwise unnamed rider in an obscured expanse and the sense of an animate past that marks these poems. The roiling of the universe exists in tension with words used to describe it, as when Oberman writes "Horse,/ meaning, to run. From the days/ when a thing was what it did,/ the act of naming itself a desire,/ for stillness, for containment." For Oberman, a medievalist as well as a poet, language is a shape-shifting historical entity. Throughout, translations from Old English poems, riddles, and charms feature alongside centos drawn from more recent texts. This sense of "times trans-shifting" informs the deep knowledge of the English from which Oberman crafts his poems as well as memory, identity, and embodied experience. Oberman beautifully renders a complex and ever-changing knot of temporalities in which past and present overlap and exert force on each other. The erudition and sophistication of Oberman's poems does not mean that they are difficult to understand; the poems are not simple, yet they are accessible and emotion-laden.
