Lynx, an online triannual, has just published its February issue. That this is the first issue of the 26th volume says a lot about Lynx‘s staying power. As usual, the new issue contains a variety of work, emphasizing collaborative and experimental work. There’s an especial interest in Japanese forms such as tanka and renga. There are also book reviews and letters from readers.
This post focuses on the ghazals, for which Lynx has provided space for a number of years. For February, three poets provide four ghazals. The first is “Magnificat for the New Year,” by Sheila E. Murphy. The musical suggestion of the title occurs throughout, although sometimes hidden. The last couplet justaposes skin and snow to produce a beautiful, hushed, subtlely erotic image:
The body’s best defense, unbroken skin,
a hush of snow light upon winter roses.
Next is “Mountain House of Stone,” by Bernard Gieske, whose ghazals have appeared in The Ghazal Page a number of times. There’s a mythic tone to the giant who commands the poet to build “a mountain house of stone.” Not up to shifting such huge weights, the poet realizes that he can build a poem that will be that stone mountain house. The ghazal suggests the weight of the words that the poet moves, lifts, arranges.
Finally, Steffen Hortstmann contributes two ghazals: “Ghazal of the Sacred Ground” and
“The World Your Word Kept Between Us.” Both of these ghazals follow the Persian/Urdu model, whereas Sheila Murphy’s sticks only to discrete couplets. I almost wrote that her ghazal is “free,” but the lines are clean and firm in sound and rhythm, so “free” might be misleading.
“Ghazal of the Sacred Ground” recalls the theme of visiting an ancient battlefield, a theme found in Japanese and Chinese poetry. Horstmann’s visit is dream-like, eerie, more than melancholy. The phrases “dark god” and “black Crypts” suggest a Lovecraftian distance in time and space, yet with a very present menace.
One person can be present with another person and yet one, or both, is absent. The refrain of Horstmann’s second ghazal, “between us,” establishes exactly that situation, two people intimate to at least the extent that they share a bed, but with something “between” them. In each couplet, the between is occupied by such things as “sudden flames,” “a body of silence,” and “the phantom in our room.” While this poem isn’t strictly narrative, it does tell a story, at least to the point of establishing a narrator and a setting.
If your main interest is ghazals, these four will more than repay your visiting Lynx. Read more, though, and you will find a variety of excellence. The haiga, especially, that combine a graphic and a haiku are startling.
