To grasp this amazing book — this doubled and redoubled book — is indeed to hold a lucky hand. To read the words of Hogue and Gallais translating Virginie Lalucq and Jean-Luc Nancy is not just to devour a long poem. It is also to receive a device for reading poetry and for exploring the possibilities of lyric address, for opening spaces in and between two languages, French and English.
Pam Rehm is a poet whose work consistently abounds with a quiet intensity. The nature of this intensity might best be described, as in her opening poem, “Another Dimension,” as an “evident immersion / in another dimension” (4), a “diligent seclusion” being the necessary beginning to such an immersion.
Right: McCarthy reading at the Kelly Writers House on January 23, 2013.
I’ve heard people gasp when they first see the cover of Pattie McCarthy’s Marybones. They’re responding to the fabulous and impossible breasts (one in particular) in Jean Fouquet’s 1452 painting.This Madonna is pornographic: anachronistically Barbie-dollish and as gray as a corpse.
“Mondrian Green” is the final poem in Fiona Hile’s Novelties,[1] and one of the most significant in this significant book. It refers to the famous absence of green in the Dutch abstract painter’s mature compositions. Mondrian is said to have hated the color, perhaps as a result of having compromised himself for years while young and struggling, painting floral still-lifes for bread and butter. Mondrian, who would apparently sit with his back to windows in order to avoid gazing out at any greenery, said during a 1915 walk in the moonlight that “all in all, nature is a damned wretched affair. I can hardly stand it.”[2]
