Friday, May 12, 2006
A hit of consciousness
I love encountering a poet whose work I hadn't known previously and who knocks my socks off. That happened recently when I read Re-entry by Michael White (University of North Texas Press, 2006). The title poem is about reentering the world after being in rehab - the shock of the world, really. And all the poems give us that wake-up call, that reminder to be open, to be conscious. This couplet has been knocking around in my head the last several weeks. It's from the poem "Everything Adrift":
the world, which calls him, calls him, woos him, till
the heart forgets why it was clenched in the first place.
I know no better description of the self-protective impulse that too often governs our lives than the clenched heart.
I usually have trouble with long poems, but the long ones in Re-entry I think are the strongest and not at all hard to get through; especially "My Bicentennial Year," "Cineplex," and the final poem, "Santa Croce." They give space to the vastness of the perceived world, and to our experience of the world: rich in detail, marvelous in their sympathy for human feeling. You can read "My Bicentennial Year" here.
the world, which calls him, calls him, woos him, till
the heart forgets why it was clenched in the first place.
I know no better description of the self-protective impulse that too often governs our lives than the clenched heart.
I usually have trouble with long poems, but the long ones in Re-entry I think are the strongest and not at all hard to get through; especially "My Bicentennial Year," "Cineplex," and the final poem, "Santa Croce." They give space to the vastness of the perceived world, and to our experience of the world: rich in detail, marvelous in their sympathy for human feeling. You can read "My Bicentennial Year" here.
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Exactly - it takes us places; that's what I love about the poems: we really live in the physical and emotional spaces the poems give to us.
Thanks, Dwayne!
SB
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Thanks, Dwayne!
SB
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