Jessica
Unregistered User
(8/14/04 1:45 pm)
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poetry drawing from myth
Just a head's up! I was reading the paper this morning and came across this:
www.nytimes.com/2004/08/1...BURTL.html
It seems like it might be something worth looking at, and it also seems in line with the tastes of this board. For those who don't have a password:
To the hills and gardens where earlier poets found calm, Brigit
Pegeen Kelly's third collection, THE
ORCHARD (Boa Editions, paper, $14.95), brings a shocked, shocking
and unfamiliar ferocity. Kelly's visions and elegies portray her
as the only live human being in a sanguinary landscape of dogs,
deer, mythical monsters, cracked statuary and children's graves:
''I lost the power,'' the title poem says, ''to tell the figures
/ In my dreams from those we call real.'' Among those figures are
''a flock of dead birds,'' ''a headless goat man'' and a ''lion
with four heads, who looks this morning / As he rises from the shadows,
like the creature / Who carries on his back the flat and shining
earth.'' For Kelly, fertility and loyalty are inseparable from predation
and death, as when ''the dead sparrow's / Brother sticks its head
in the mouth of the lion.'' At times the whole book seems to mourn,
and to gain its power by mourning, the same dead child: relentless
lines pray and shout, demanding answers, but find ''waterstained
stone cupids'' and ''the black black earth'' instead.
--Jessica.
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