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    The Unstill Ones: Poems
    The Unstill Ones: Poems
    The Unstill Ones: Poems
    Ebook96 pages1 hour

    The Unstill Ones: Poems

    By Miller Oberman

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    About this ebook

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateSep 25, 2017
    ISBN9781400888771
    The Unstill Ones: Poems

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      Book preview

      The Unstill Ones - Miller Oberman

      ONES

      CÆDMON’S HYMN

      [translated from the Old English]

      Now we will honor the heaven-kingdom’s keeper,

      the measurer’s might, and his mindthoughts,

      the work of the wonder father, as he wrought,

      boundless lord, the beginning of every beauty.

      The first poet made, for the souls of soil,

      heaven for a roof, holy maker.

      After that, mankind’s keeper made

      middle-earth, master almighty,

      eternal lord, earth, for everyone.

      ON TRANS

      The process of through is ongoing.

      The earth doesn’t seem to move, but sometimes we fall

      down against it and seem to briefly alight on its turning.

      We were just going. I was just leaving,

      which is to say, coming

      elsewhere. Transient. I was going as I came, the words

      move through my limbs, lungs,mouth, as I appear to sit

      peacefully at your hearthtransubstantiating some wine.

      It was a rough red,it was one of those nights we were not

      forced by circumstancesto drink wine out of mugs.

      Circumstances being, in those cases, no one had been

      transfixed at the kitchen sink long enoughto wash dishes.

      I brought armfuls of woodfrom the splitting stump.

      Many of them, because it was cold,went right on top

      of their recent ancestors.It was an ice night.

      They transpired visibly,resin to spark,

      bark to smoke, wood to ash.I was

      transgendering and drinkingthe rough red at roughly

      the same rateand everyone who looked, saw.

      The translucence of flamesbeat against the air

      against our skins.This can be done with

      or without clothes on.This can be done with

      or without wine or whiskeybut never without water:

      evaporation is also ongoing.Most visibly in this case

      in the form of wisps of steam rising from the just washed

      hair

      of a form at the fire whose beauty wasin the earth’s

      turning, that night and many nights,transcendent.

      I felt heat changing me.The word for this is

      transdesire, but in extreme caseswe call it transdire

      or when this heat becomes your maker we say

      transire, or when it happensin front of a hearth:

      transfire.

      WULF AND EADWACER

      [after the anonymous Old English poem of the same title]

      The poem is either about a woman

      separated from a man by a petty

      tribal war, or about a woman

      forced to live with a second man

      because of a petty tribal war.

      Either way, she bears a child.

      Either way, one man is kept

      prisoner on an island, guarded

      by bloodthirsty swords. Either

      way, the woman sits crying

      in the rain, sheltered by trees,

      or it could be the rain is crying,

      or it could be there is no rain,

      she’s only using it as an image.

      The second man, who is not

      the island prisoner, whose name

      means possession-watcher,

      comes to the woman to protect

      her, or imprison her, or because

      he wants a woman just then,

      and so fucks her. This feels good

      to her because she’s lonely, or

      likes a good fuck sometimes,

      or because she loves this second

      man, not the first. But afterwards

      it sickens her, out of loyalty

      to the imprisoned man, or

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