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emilymaria's review against another edition
mysterious
reflective
fast-paced
4.0
A beautiful collection of distant words
suddenflamingword's review against another edition
3.0
In Brenda Hillman's introduction, there's one sentence that strikes the perfect measure of Dark Sky Questions: "An epistemology is always the erotic slave to method." I say it's the perfect measure because it perfectly captures how Szporluk embraces and inverts the metaphysical tradition. Hillman describes it as "less from the metaphysical poets than from a kind of force field that moves between the romantic and the early modernist traditions, arriving, after a dark fertile Coleridgean thrashing, at a muted postmodernism" - which works, although I can't help but think of Abelard & Heloise's love letters. It's a yawning gap between intimacy and contact in Szporluk's poetry that one imagines how aliens might feel, having spent so many generations searching for earth that they can't even remember having sent the Wow signal, finding earth is nothing more than the subsonic echoes of an ecological collapse.
Unfortunately I felt that the high-tension act of making her poems (as she writes in "Ignis Fatuus") "big and not great" such that "part of the sky is all of the sky./The rest is wasted" often turned less into transgressive statements against modes of human life/ideation and more into broader-brimmed ideas like "sin" - as in "The Grass and the Sin" which ends "If Noah's water never came, who would know how bad the land had been...." The poem ends with an ellipses, lending it a meditative incompleteness, but it came across to me as an uninteresting way to think about the mythology of the flood, let alone about any mythology whatsoever.
And this is what "an epistemology is always the erotic slave to method" means to me. At her best, Szporluk depicts entities as bearers solely of themselves which get wrapped up in a network of significations that are semi-directly teased out. This is almost exactly what she implies in an interview with The Journal where she says, explaining the grim origin of another poem, "I suppose the image surpasses myth by the fact of being real. And, being real, the image has no agenda other than to have happened." Which is the great horror of the "part of the sky being all of the sky" and "all these birds without birdness," as ("Biology of Heaven"). There's a kind of rarefied terror in the destruction of humanity - both metaphysically and literally, as is obvious in "The Corals." I would say a fascinating book that does an equivalent thing to "the human" is CM Koseman's All Tomorrows.
Unfortunately I felt that the high-tension act of making her poems (as she writes in "Ignis Fatuus") "big and not great" such that "part of the sky is all of the sky./The rest is wasted" often turned less into transgressive statements against modes of human life/ideation and more into broader-brimmed ideas like "sin" - as in "The Grass and the Sin" which ends "If Noah's water never came, who would know how bad the land had been...." The poem ends with an ellipses, lending it a meditative incompleteness, but it came across to me as an uninteresting way to think about the mythology of the flood, let alone about any mythology whatsoever.
And this is what "an epistemology is always the erotic slave to method" means to me. At her best, Szporluk depicts entities as bearers solely of themselves which get wrapped up in a network of significations that are semi-directly teased out. This is almost exactly what she implies in an interview with The Journal where she says, explaining the grim origin of another poem, "I suppose the image surpasses myth by the fact of being real. And, being real, the image has no agenda other than to have happened." Which is the great horror of the "part of the sky being all of the sky" and "all these birds without birdness," as ("Biology of Heaven"). There's a kind of rarefied terror in the destruction of humanity - both metaphysically and literally, as is obvious in "The Corals." I would say a fascinating book that does an equivalent thing to "the human" is CM Koseman's All Tomorrows.
andsweeti's review against another edition
3.0
These poems were like Emily Dickinson if she were a French surrealist. The poems are plain in language and deep in metaphor, and the themes present in the first section stay for the rest of the book, which made it flow nicely. Some of the poems seemed too close to other poems in the book, but if you can look past that, it's a fine read.
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