The Unstill Ones

Poems

Miller Oberman

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780691176833, 9780691176826
• eBook ISBN: 9781400888771
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

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.

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NATURAL HISTORY

I wanted to see Comanche,

so you took me in the snow,

to the dusty small-town museum.

You said it had once been fine,

glamorous, even, and the shaggy

Kodiak in the Americas could light

the scene with his teeth. Now

the sky is faded white, water-

stained, paint flakes on the heads

of bobcats and badgers, someone’s

tusk fell in the dried-up river,

there’s dryrot in the buffalo herd.

Past the desert and beyond

the snowy waste and boreal forest,

in a small black-painted hallway,

there’s one glass cube, and in it,

Comanche. He is alone in the cube.

He is not well lit. They have him raised

to a low hover. His hooves dusty

like he just ran in, his coat a claybank shine.

Still saddled and alert, with the kindest eyes.

A man in a trenchcoat shuffles in,

presses himself against the wall

like a moth. I was tired from standing.

My leg hurt. I briefly thought of crying.

I thought of smashing the glass

with a kick, riding Comanche out.

I thought of grabbing your hand,

pulling you into the flat black

paint and kissing you, I thought of

pouring my blood into your blood,

of becoming daylight inside you, of you

becoming the prairie under me, or

above. Of golden grass, of the perfect

darkness behind Comanche,

of the hands that built a wood frame,

cured his hide, stretched it over, and whether

they could recall in their bones what it is

to gallop, flat out, into the streaming—

I thought I wanted to see Comanche

but that was not what I wanted, and

that man was there, in the trenchcoat,

and my shot leg throbbed and I stayed

what I was. A stuffed thing.

I couldn’t meet your eyes, only

Comanche’s. Which had been

for a hundred years and more, and

continued to be, made out of glass.

THE WORD AGAIN

My friend once didn’t thank me

for pointing out five poems in his sheaf

where he’d used the word pith. That book

about the never-breaking branch—

dark, in every poem, or nearly. Today

I saw bear in mine all over. One with

actual bears, or at least people

resembling bears, galumphing

down the street, and rivers

that bear you up, and then the bearers,

human, of a coffin, but nothing about

what anyone can bear or not bear, nothing

about what can be borne, though there is

one poem skeleton called “Rainbears,”

which are not real and never were.

Shaggyblue, skywater soaked, nothing un-

bearable to them, no sorrow, no rage,

they would be strong as gods.

I was this kind of bear or god, nothing

couldn’t be borne, I thought.

No insult, no grief, no binding

lash. When everyone went indoors,

I was dripping fog in the field,

endlessly strong, endlessly crushed. But I’m not,

now, any kind of shabby martyr.

There are unbearable things.

Most things are unbearable.

Being inside when I want to be outside,

interminable fear of doing or saying

the wrong thing, disdain, modernist couches,

many people, not being able to say this is—

when it is—unbearable.

AGAINST A DWARF

[translated from the Old English]

Against a dwarf one should take seven little wafers, like those for offering,

and write these names on each wafer:

Maximanius, Malchus, Iohannes, Martimanius, Dionisius,

Constantinus, Serafion.

Then in turn one must sing the spell

that is spoken hereafter. One shall sing, first in

the left ear, then in the right ear, then above that man’s

head. And then bring a virgin and hang it around

her neck, and do this for thre...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• ᛖ
• ᛠ
• ᛞ
• Acknowledgments
• Notes