Wolfville NS/Montreal
QC: I’m
extremely impressed with Montreal poet and critic Klara du Plessis’ chapbook unfurl: Four Essays (Wolfville NS:
Gaspereau Press, 2019), an assemblage of some of the sharpest and engaging
critical work I’ve read in some time. Her language and detail are swift,
electric and utterly delightful, and some of the sharpest, smartest prose I’ve
seen. As the small collection opens:
Unfurl, for me, is the shape
of a leaf managing itself into growth. It’s the gesture of a front uncurling
itself, standing upright, broad-shouldered and confident. It’s a leaf from a
book, a page inscribing poetry that is organic and energetic and lends itself
to my mind.
Un-furl is a negation with a generative
definition. The word’s semantic growth is so strong that its prefix denoting
absence is satiated, incorporated, and reinvigorated into verdure.
Unfurl is a collection of
four review essays, each on a different recent poetry title by a Canadian
writer—Planetary Noise: Selected Poetry of Erín Moure, Lisa Robertson’s 3 Summers, Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk and an overview of a couple of titles by Anne Carson, a short essay
that begins:
Anne Carson never completes a book. Currently,
I am surrounded by her books. Plainwater
is on my lap. Red Doc> lies open
beside me and Decreation peeks out
from underneath it. It crosses my mind that I need an extra perpendicular desk
to lay out Eros the Bittersweet, my
printout of “The Gender of Sound,” the multiple inserts of Float. And yet, Anne Carson never completes a book.
Sometimes
I feel I spend my whole life rewriting
the same
page.
As
she writes, again, in her opening pages: “I am attuned to heed work on
language, ars poetics, self-referential dialogue of grammar and poetics. I seek
out female embodiment of intelligence through sensuality, racial integration
into geographies of mind and space. Yet each essay also stands alone. I am not
flattening these poets through similarity. Rather, it’s a curious, beauteous
phenomenon to see the reading of four poets’ work channeled so clearly through
a mind, a set of concerns, an ecstatic moment of being animated to write. There
is endless strength in considering how poems go together, enter into dialogue
with one another, rub up against one another, contrast and scratch at one
another as they draw on an archive of an individual’s reading practice become
writing. My reading mind à my writing mind, unfurl.” I can only hope that these
essays are a teaser for an eventual full-length collection.
Minneapolis MN: New from American poet Rosmarie Waldrop comes the stunning chapbook Rehearsing the Symptoms (Minneapolis MN: Rain Taxi, 2019), a short
assemblage of poems – “Wanting,” “Thinking,” “Doubting,” “Knowing,” “Doing,”
“Coupling,” “Escaping Analogy,” “Meaning,” “Translating,” “Loving Words” and
“Aging” – that sit at the heart of what Waldrop’s work has been doing for more
than five decades: utilizing the poem as a space for sharp thinking on being,
writing and literature. Given the amount of work she has published over the
past fifty or so years (something evidenced through Rosmarie and Keith
Waldrop’s recent Keeping / the window open: Interviews, statements, alarms, excursions, edited by Ben Lerner,
with an introduction by Aaron Kunin that Wave Books produced earlier this year
[see my review of such here]), I find it stunning just how breathtaking and
relevant her work continues to be, writing evocatively around specifics and
abstracts, language and being, and the impossibly concrete, as in this excerpt
of the poem “Loving Words”:
I’ve filled my house with many different
things. As if to create an ecology to encourage diversity of experience. The
way areas with greater numbers of animal and plant species are said also to
have a greater number of languages.
Yet I’ve retreated into the two dimensions of
page and perspective cavalière.
Turned my back on the window in favor of definitive articles on perception. Of
introversion and subcutaneous shivers.
No comments:
Post a Comment