Seguiriyas

Description

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.

Seguiriyas can be purchased through any of the following:

Black Ocean Press//Amazon//Amazon Canada//Indigo//Bookshop//Barnes & Noble

Praise

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. . . . The poems in their immediate appeal—emotion, vividly inventive description, plangent eloquence, moving simplicity, phrase-making, and image-making power—contain a network of connections adequate to the web of history itself and to the dialogic relationship of each human person to history through their place.
A.F. Moritz (Guggenheim Fellow and author of The Sentinel, winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize)

Rivered and pitched in history’s great song, Ben Meyerson’s Seguiriyas sings of bringing what is lost not back but forth to be examined. Here . . . fervent current circles toward a willingness to dwell—to inhabit the habits of what home we only visit, to settle in the weather of sojourns interned as home. Meyerson attunes his cadences of peril to the root of what is left: even in “the essential scrum of life. . . . this unspooling tourniquet of days”—family, religion, a body survived in the past’s crude acts—”elegy redeems itself” and “demands/a rejoinder.” Enwrapped and ready, the music we receive is “difficult for the ear to forget.”
Daniel Khalastchi (author of American Parables, winner of the Brittingham Prize for Poetry)

Other Resources

You can find an interview in which I discuss the book in detail here.

Several journals have featured poems from Seguiriyas and made them available online. Here is a selection:

“Scenario” in Interim

“Tekiah Gedolah” in Pank

“Granada After The Correlation” in Dusie

“Cantabria” and “Para Tocar” in Periodicities