Three Ghosts

A master of modernist summoning, John Tipton brings three historical voices back to life though translation and collage.

"A strange book, demanding yet alluring, like a ghost. Couplets made from a nineteenth-century white lawyer's diary of his travels among Indigenous American tribes; an ancient Greek soldier-poet's fragments, by turns lusty and bitter; and a collage of Elizabethan translations of Roman histories about the emperor Nero--as its sources might suggest, Three Ghosts is full of rivers, weapons, signs taken for wonders, and, beneath the cinematic details, a fascination with how stories survive their cultures. Reading Three Ghosts is like stepping into a hall of portents: in one room, George Catlin is watching buffaloes 'blackening the plains' before they are slaughtered; in another, Romans observe their soon-to-die emperor's 'meate being striken with lightning.' 'Now we'll believe anything / expect everything, ' Tipton's Archilochus says, words that come earliest in history but could hardly feel more contemporary. As with his last book that juxtaposed Euripides with the Gospel of Mark, John Tipton works in the vein of what he calls 'the modernist tradition of inventive translation' and collage, a venerable line honed by Pound, Reznikoff, and Weinberger. Unlike much contemporary poetry that foregrounds the meager self, this long game requires equal parts curiosity, mischief, and vision. Tipton is one of our leading practitioners."--Nate Klug