Michael Minassian’s 1000 Pieces of Time Resurrects Past Themes

and gets to his feet,

This matter-of-fact introduction leads into an unexpected, striking image:

but he’s only giving up

his seat to an old

woman all in black

like the widows of Troy

dressed like crows

before they leapt

off the wall.

Farther on, “The True Story of Lot” purposefully clashes with the Biblical version but also dialogues with that of another Armenian poet, Nigoghos Sarafian. A member of the so-called “Menk Group” or “We Generation” nearly a century ago, Sarafian warned Armenians not to keep looking back at the past or risk, like Lot’s wife, being turned into a pillar of salt. Here Minassian emphasizes the tragedy that befell Lot and his assumed bloodline:

Later Lot’s daughters

claimed Moab and Ammon

were their father’s sons,

but the hard nubs

on the boys’ shoulders,

vestiges of wings,

told a different story

Lot left to mourn alone,

as the stars shrugged

and his wife’s shadow

trailed behind.

In “Dressing the Buddha,” the poet recognizes Shakyamuni Buddha in the street “wearing only a thin robe, / walking barefoot along the road” and takes action:

…I took off my coat

and draped it over his shoulders,

then took him home

for a cup of tea and bowl of rice.

He also gives Buddha a pair of his wife’s boots! This irks her of course but, like her husband, she has kind heart and comes to the Buddha’s succor as well. In a tender image which borrows from Edna St. Vincent Millay’s famed Recuerdo (We hailed, “Good morrow, mother!” to a shawl covered head… And she wept, “God bless you!” for the apples and pears,/And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.”) Minassian writes instead:

“Have you been meditating again?”

she asked me, shaking her head,

“you can take me shoe shopping

as soon as I put these groceries away” —

but before the Buddha could cross the road

she ran after him and gave him her saffron-colored scarf,

wrapping it gently twice around his bare neck:

“Thanks,” is all he said.

In other places, Minassian’s verse left me puzzled, as when he writes:

“Don’t worry about what is to come,” he shouted

as he climbed into his time machine,

“the past goes whizzing past your head like a bullet.

The rest is all made up.”

Here the poet seems to reverse past and present — but to what end? Another opaque image reads: “Poets may speak of loss and regret, /but the next day brought only knives of zero/and the dawn’s empty hand.”

In the end, my favorite poem may well be “Emily at the Waffle House,” where Minassian reimagines Emily Dickinson as a waitress who scribbles down brilliant verse between serving pancakes and eggs:

I watched her write furiously

on her waitress pad, scrawling poems

instead of someone’s breakfast order,

or writing letters to the dead

she would post later

on bathroom walls.

…Half of poetry is language,

the other half

the hollow part

of thought, I wrote.

And then in “I Will Speak for the Bees,” there is the striking:

“The heart knows what it wants

but not who it wants —

I will speak for the bees,

the sting of love fierce on my tongue.”

Poetry, more than any other form of writing is very much a matter of personal taste. To me, the poems in Part I ring strongest, though the final poem of the anthology, “It’s a Black and White World Again,” also lands. A clever riff on the film “Casablanca,” it offers a paraphrased poetic rendition of this classic film, in which Minassian writes with cheek:

“After all, this whole story is from the script

of an unproduced Broadway play

which somehow ended up as a movie

where people speak in code —

maybe because they forgot their lines.”

Along with Bogey and the ending of Minassian’s 1000 Pieces of Time, I will end my review with a wink: Here’s looking at you, kid.

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