Earth’s
Ends
By Andrew Kaufman
81 pp.
Pearl Editions, 2005
A
POET COMPELLED
By Tsipi Keller
Andrew Kaufman is a seer and listener. Reading the list of titles on the Contents page, and even before getting to the
poems themselves, the reader has already been transported to another plane. Kaufman visits villages from the Himalayas to the Andes, regions which are more remote than remote, and gives a voice to the perennially voiceless, to legless and armless beggars, to child prostitutes, to those who may briefly exist at the periphery of our NewsHour vision, and then vanish. These people are far away, in places such as Vietnam, Cambodia, Bolivia, places most of us are content not to visit, prudently following the advice of
travel guides, such as the one Kaufman cites in the poem, “Fodor’s Travel Guide: Southeast Asia, 1994:”
Do not go to Cambodia.
Six million land mines are still scattered – everywhere.
Bones lie in fields, like broken cacti
Kaufman's poems are
beautiful and stark, like a black-and-white etching, or a photograph, you find yourself unable to stop looking at. As the title suggests, this collection takes us to
Earth's ends, both literally and figuratively. The language is simple and direct and poignant - there is no attempt to "poeticize," to obscure, or to be clever. These are poems from the largest of hearts as Kaufman becomes the armless beggar, the drunk shaman, the child prostitute, and herein lies the strength of this unique book.
Whorehouses, temples, shrines and mausoleums abound in these poems. And cemeteries. And former tyrants and emperors. And armed soldiers. But, there’s a subtle humor, too, a humor that comes from pain and, yes, powerlessness. In “The Mausoleum of Ho Chi Minh,” we find:
His brown eyes,
empty, the thin fingers, pointed toward his feet,
suggest a praying mantis. He spends two months a year
in Moscow, “for maintenance.”
Alongside poverty and exploitation, there is a kind of touching, primal purity. In the beautiful, “Daybreak, Northern Thailand,” the poet is waking, trying to write a couple of lines, when two small girls come into his hootch:
If the one without clothes were ten years older,
I’d swear she had come to seduce me,
stretching, supine on the
mat,
laughing mischievously, like her older sisters.
A grain of rice is stuck between the lips
of her vulva.
In theme and style, “Earth’s Ends” stands alone. The book won the Pearl Poetry Prize, and, in the words of Fred Voss, who had selected it: “
ith all the degradation suffered by these people...there is always survival.” And so for the poet, too, survival is often a solitary path, late at night, going back to his bed in a guesthouse, to his mat in a hooch, or, back in New York, wandering, half lost,
having outwalked the farthest city light,
to return pre-dawn across soot-flecked frost,
my lusts bright domes of gold in the sun,
my terrors beggars with stumps for hands.