2014 Peace Corps Writers Award for Best Poetry Book

In 1997, the first annual award for an outstanding poetry
book by a Peace Corps writer was presented.

•

CONGRATULATIONS to Ben Berman (Zimbabwe 1998–2000) for winning the Peace Corps Writers 2014 Best Book of Poetry for his collection  Strange Borderlands published in 2013.  Ben will receive a small cash award and a certificate.

John Coyne comments —

As editor of Peace Corps Worldwide, several times a week I received books in the mail from RPCV writers — mostly I knew they are coming as I had been forewarned by the author. Then in early 2013 I received one via Amazon.com that came to me without notice — no fanfare, I hadn’t requested it. It was a collection of poems from a guy named Ben Berman. Never heard of him.

The jacket cover with its bright colors suggested Africa. When I looked closer I saw that it was an image entitled, The Unnamed by Petros of Harare, Zimbabwe. On the author page, sure enough there was black-and-white photo of young Ben Berman, and a short biographical paragraph saying that he grew up in Maine and served with the Peace Corps in Zimbabwe. Now, for some reason we don’t have many writers who were PCVs in Zimbabwe. Nor, for that matter, do we have many RPCV poets.

The collection of poems had been published by yet another small press, a publisher in California called Able Muse Press. I never heard of them. The back of the jacket was crowded with quotes from poets — and good poets, too — praising this first collection of Ben’s poems.

Gregory Djanikian called it a “marvelous first book;” Dzvinia Orlowsky wrote that the poems “dig deep into the casual and the casualty of daily life,” while Alan Shapiro wrote that the collection was “a masterful study in the power and limits of empathy.”

Well, anyone who publishes a book knows the power of friendship can produce “log-rolling” blurbs for any writer on anything they write.

I tossed the book aside onto a short stack of recent arrivals.

Then the some days later , having work to do and searching for a good excuse to procrastinate, I picked up Strange Borderlands and thumbed through the 80 pages of prose and poetry.

Poet Ben Berman

What was obvious immediately was that Berman uses a variety of poetic approaches: rhymed couplets, prose paragraphs, sonnets, free verse. Also, the poems are divided between his Peace Corps experience and what happens afterwards. And what is also obvious is that the guy can write. In fact, he is one of the best RPCV poets who served in Africa that I have read, right up there with Ann Neelon (Senegal 1978–79), Phil Dacey (Nigeria 1964–66), Susan Rich (Niger 1984–86), and Sandra Meek (Botswana 1978–81).

What is key about his work, and as the poet and creative writing professor Fred Marchant points out in his Foreword, is that in the second half of the book, ”[Berman] focuses on the aftermath of the Peace Corps, the way those deeply formative experiences become absorbed and retained. Thus the book brings us inward, towards the poet’s psychological landscape, and how it has been altered by his experience.”

In other words: we have the poems from his two years in Zimbabwe, and then we have the poems of Ben trying to sort it all out, or as he writes in “Gallery Walk, ii”:

I’d been home a couple of years already but was still
struggling with the blurred lines of where things end.

Today, Ben Berman teaches creative writing classes at Brookline High School and with Grub Street Writers. He has received fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and Somerville Arts Council and honors from the New England Poetry Club. He is married and has a daughter and lives in the Boston Area. He writes lovely poems and he is the winner of our Poetry Award for 2014. Congratulations, Ben.

•

Review of Strange Borderlands
first published in Peace Corps Writers on 3/19/2013

.

Strange Borderlands
(Poems)
by Ben Berman (Zimbabwe 1998-2000)
Able Muse Press
80 Pages
2013
$18.95 (paperback), $9.99 (Kindle)

Reviewed by Jan Worth-Nelson (Tonga 1976–78)

As an unwilling alumna of a Peace Corps tragedy during my service many years ago — the 1976 murder in the Kingdom of Tonga of one Volunteer by another, I quickly attuned to heart-pulsing themes of violence and cultural dislocation in Ben Berman’s riveting first poetry collection, Strange Borderlands.

I have never quite recovered from the shock and senselessness of that murder, not to mention the unceasing parade of vivid, direct, in-your-face carnage — chickens, cats, dogs, horses, whales, the old woman in the hut behind me — what seems, in persistent memory, to be a daily, bloody assault, often in startling contrast to banal quotidian life.

During a powerful earthquake during my first year, I stumbled out of my hut shrieking with fear — I would die 9,000 miles from home. The next day, stunned by my survival, I found myself eating Beef Wellington and drinking red wine at the Peace Corps country director’s house, making surreal small talk with my boss, a 6-foot-7 hereditary noble with an Oxford accent.   How to make sense of any of it?

As a young Volunteer English teacher in Zimbabwe from 1998 to 2000, Berman was quickly embroiled in a similar stew of cruelty and confusion. “Zimbabwe means The House/ of Stones and I was getting grittier/by the day, gritting my teeth/and studying how to sharpen a knife.” he writes in “Learning Shona.”

It was not just young Berman who was at risk, however — he was, in fact, essentially safe on the sidelines and able to escape. After a national election when things turned violent, Berman was evacuated out of his village into a small city and the Peace Corps program reduced. Many of his Zimbabwean friends had died. (In his sestina “Moving On” he marks the ongoing losses: “Please, Edwin writes, Lovewell and Benson have passed away.  I am next.”)  But, in the meantime, he steeled himself to pay attention and writes in “Passing Three Goats in a Field, the Ropes Around Their Necks Tied to Tall Grass”:

Everywhere I looked, back then, I saw death,
teasingly avoidable and unsheathed. . .

The struggle between what one might call “order” — both civil and poetic — and the numbing effect of violence, disease, fear and oddness permeates Berman’s work. In the face of certain kinds of extremities, one cannot keep feeling. In the gripping rhyming poem “Detachment and Delicacies,” ostensibly about killing and cleaning chickens, he writes,

Even slaughter grows somewhat methodic —
you hold their heads to calm the spasmodic

fits of their feet, focus on precision
how the right cut, like a good revision

can produce a more deft and seamless
execution. . .

And he concludes,

but I was dumping hearts into a bucket
and wanted life to feel delicate,

wanted to handle each flimsy liver
with the fine alertness of a lover.

Sometimes one makes sense by downplaying interpretation, by simply (even flatly) describing. As we creative writing teachers so often exhort our students, there is good reason to “show not tell” — powerful sense detail often is how to invite the reader’s initial attention and response.  This is true of much of the first half of Berman’s collection. In the first poem, for example, he listens to the radio, listing how “Rhumba turns into world news, weather,/sports, Shona.  Then Dolly Parton.  Then drums/Silence.  More Rhumba.  It never ends, never/connects.”

He describes digging a grave, finding a dead dog in the middle of the road, drinking beer and getting stuck in mud, sitting on a corpse-filled coffin in the back of a truck.

Much of the material is  “sensational” of course — dangerously so, for a writer.

But Berman turns effectively to form as his ally, wrestling some of his most difficult material into a-b-a-b quatrains, sonnets and rhyming couplets.  In an email, Berman explained that he worked in form because “I simply needed a sense of order as I wrote; in other ways, I needed the undercurrent of form working with or against the content.”  The effects compress and constrain emotion, containing chaos and turning to the comforts of his Western traditions (a quote from Emily Dickinson here, a snippet from Donald Revell there) as if to keep  from running himself off the cliff in a demon-possessed herd.

The second half of the book is more reflective, if not more comfortable.  Back home, his life as a high school English teacher is haunted by dreams of the Zimbabwean dead.  These later poems poignantly convey an insistent and nettlesome remembering, a half-wild entertaining of meaning, along with an unsettled understanding that there might not be any.

“Still,” he asserts in the concluding prose poem, “there is something about the man running and his dead-end flirting with the world — the way he continues on, flailing and unwavering.”

Many of us, especially the young middle-class Americans so often drawn to the Peace Corps, were unprepared for the raw violence we encountered — both “casual and casualty” as Berman puts it in the aptly named “Obsession.” Encounters with this side of life can be shocking and traumatizing, and not always, in the end, rewarded by redemption. These hard truths are the territory of poetry, where the heart can be resuscitated and the mangled viscera respected, if never quite restored.  Berman says his original title for the book was Close to Closure — an approximation suited to the struggles twisted and taut within these pages. In this collection Ben Berman establishes himself as an eloquent voice in chronicling the dichotomies of darkness and light. It seems to be the U.S. Peace Corps that took him into that troubling borderland.

•

Reviewer Jan Worth-Nelson is about to retire from 26 years at the University of Michigan — Flint, where she has been a writing teacher and, for the past three years, Director of the Thompson Center for Learning and Teaching. She is married to another Peace Corps Volunteer, Ted Nelson (Turkey 1964–66), whom she first met in Tonga and re-met 25 years later. They have been commuting between Flint and San Pedro, CA for 13 years. Worth-Nelson’s novel, Night Blind, fictionally explores a Peace Corps murder in Tonga in 1976.  She also has written many poems, short stories and personal essays — a writing life she is eager to resume full time after retirement.