Home » Newpages Blog » Michigan Quarterly Review – Spring 2007

Michigan Quarterly Review – Spring 2007

Volume 46 Number 2

Spring 2007

Quarterly

Anna Sidak

This rewarding collection of essays, poems, and fiction avoids direct confrontation with current concerns—war, poverty, ecology—in favor of a Jewish boy’s memoir of 1938 Berlin and Vienna and Bertolt Brecht’s poem on WWII propaganda. From Brecht’s “The Government as Artist”: “It is well known that an artist can be stupid and yet / be a great artist. In this way, too / the government resembles the artist. As one says of Rembrandt / that he couldn’t have painted any differently if he had been born without hands, / so it can be said of the government that it couldn’t govern any differently / if it had been born without a head.”

This rewarding collection of essays, poems, and fiction avoids direct confrontation with current concerns—war, poverty, ecology—in favor of a Jewish boy’s memoir of 1938 Berlin and Vienna and Bertolt Brecht’s poem on WWII propaganda. From Brecht’s “The Government as Artist”: “It is well known that an artist can be stupid and yet / be a great artist. In this way, too / the government resembles the artist. As one says of Rembrandt / that he couldn’t have painted any differently if he had been born without hands, / so it can be said of the government that it couldn’t govern any differently / if it had been born without a head.”

John Felstiner’s essay, “If He Do But Touch the Hills, They Shall Smoke: Singing Ecology Unto the Lord,” traces biblical appreciations of wilderness through the Psalms and onward in the work of Bacon, Emerson, Whitman, Dickenson, Thoreau and modern writers—Stegner, Lowell, Levertov, etc. The cover of this attractive issue displays one of William Blake’s illustrations for The Book of Job; another appears within Alicia Ostriker’s essay, “Job: The Open Book,” a fascinating exploration of the origin of fundamental ideas and subsequent questions involving the contradictory nature of Job’s God and the mysterious origin and nature of our concept of justice.

Short stories by Joyce Carol Oates often involve an arctic plunge into cold reality, but “Donor Organs,” in which experimental punctuation replaces dashes with blank spaces and dispenses with paragraph breaks, semi-colons, and periods for seven dense pages, works surprisingly well, its novelty clouding the issue sufficiently for contemplation.
[www.umich.edu/~mqr]

Spread the word!