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A Review of M Sarki's Zimble Zamble Zumble |
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If the poems in Zimble Zamble Zumble [elimae books, 2000] had been previously published in The Paris Review or The New Yorker, M Sarki would by now have been hailed as a marvelous home-grown successor to Charles Simic and the book itself offered by Knopf or Farrar Straus. But the poems have instead appeared mostly in online magazines, such as elimae and 5_Trope, and Sarki is virtually unknown. Which may be just as well, for the time being, because the comparison to Simic would be misleading and maybe even harmful. For one thing Sarki's poems owe more to the not quite Dadaist tendencies of Wallace Stevens than to European surrealism; for another, Simic would give his third eye to write poems as wonderful and delicious as the best of these. I frequently have no idea what Sarki is talking "about," but his language both astonishes and amuses me. Zimble Zamble Zumble gives more pleasure than the last dozen Pulitzer Prize winners all together. |
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