Seguiriyas
Seguiriyas
by Ben Meyerson
Paperback / 96p. / Poetry
ISBN 978-1939568-73-1
A debut poetry collection that draws on the music and culture of flamenco to explore diasporic experience.
In Seguiriyas—which derives its title from the flamenco palo (or “song form”) of the same name—Ben Meyerson picks paths through the reverberations of diaspora, displacement, and transit. Meyerson's poems travel between his upbringing in an Ashkenazi Jewish family in Toronto and his time spent plumbing the historical tensions that animate Andalusian culture. Amid the pull of diaspora and dispersion, Meyerson assembles an array of reference points ranging from flamenco performance to the history of the Roma in Spain, medieval Iberian poetry, rock music, and the echoes of Jewish ritual practice. Seguiriyas does not seek to neatly arrange the pluralities that it observes; rather, it moves in their wake, offering a form of careful attention and vibrant song.
“Currents and rapids fountain Meyerson’s verse, while stone tropes stabilize his architecture. Words brush one another in close choreography: assonance of hours and sound, me only; consonance of trails and tassels; and echoes of rapids … passes. Chunter is both chatter and chanter. The pentameter of each sentence is interrupted by line breaks to close each sentence and to make stanzas close to the poet, who is both the only one and the one who hears only these sounds. . . [An] impressive book.”
“Seguiriyas sings of bringing what is lost not back but forth to be examined. Through rain and flood, through throngs of wrongs, Meyerson attunes his cadences of peril to the root of what is left. Enwrapped and ready, the music we receive is ‘difficult for the ear to forget.’”
“Seguiriyas’s magnificent lyricism and philosophy of self and history rests on this poet’s deep experience of Spain and knowledge of its rich past of splendid meetings, brutal divorces, brilliant and tragic memories, profound and troubling idealizations, marvelous traditions of song and poetry. It is a book of depth, wide-eyed mourning, and the dream.”
