Small Porcelain Head is filled with beautifully crafted poems…which offer a thought-provoking relationship between form and content, dazzling the reader with visually arresting imagery all the while. In short, White’s latest collection is a finely crafted book, and a truly spectacular addition to this gifted writer’s body of work.
Meditation would be too tame a word; instead, it is more appropriate to describe To Anacreon as an exploration
It is hard not to recall the deft turns of Mary Oliver in Clark’s work—both poets seem to be working within a tradition that seeks to understand the self by way of the natural world that is so often viewed as “other,” asking the human how and why and where it belongs in this world.
“The fact that Collom invites the audience to take part in the work of the poet and actively contribute to the meaning of the text, renders the work, and its meaning, even more impermanent. In many ways, these formal decisions mirror the ecological message that recurs throughout the book. Just as the text is a collaboration between artist and audience, nature itself is what we make of it, retaining the possibility of both grandeur and ruin.”
Michael Heller’s poems, now available in their imposing entirety in This Constellation Is a Name, more often than not take place in both a figurative and a literal sense, for Heller brings a traveller’s—not a tourist’s, mind you—keen observing sensibility to bear on everything around him.
Addressing the morning I say
It was good of you to come
1 The interior holds out its leathery hands. It wants to take me to California Where technicians will construct my head, And where the streetlights are broken yolks And small furry things crawl up my legs. 2 I decline the offer so the interior flips a switch Which makes my teeth cold as though I […]
I. Before the invention of glass, time was not translucent. Mostly it kept to itself, bandaging the wounded, sleeping inside the minerals that formed below our restlessness. Sometimes a volcano spit out a fugitive star—it cooled into obsidian, a window we could neither repair nor see through. But its arrows taught us the meaning of […]
In The Final Take, Susko seeks to record something that puts to rest the aftereffects of having survived, making out of poetry a kind of prolepsis that fills the void of an apocalyptic delay. And so the poems trudge toward a horizon that rips across the skyline like a mass grave as the attempts at memorializing, at making things appear by keeping time, ultimately falter: “Then you disappeared, that is / what happens in wars.” Finally, it is disappearance itself that appears in the wake of these vanishings.
Evans’s A Penance, though not perfect, challenges readers in a way that requires them to continuously re-read the text in order to plunge the depths that he has constructed. This collection should be required reading for anybody interested in contemporary poetry, especially if a reader has become disillusioned by the overbearing “I” or the gilded forms of surface experimentalisms that grow dull after one reading.