A review by siria
Scriptorium: Poems by Melissa Range

4.0

A lovely collection of poems that draws on medieval manuscripts and the poet's Appalachian birthplace to think about language, place, and authority. As a medievalist, I particularly enjoyed the pigment poems, each one drawing its inspiration from a pigment that you might find in a medieval manuscript, like "Lampblack" ("Black as a charred plum-stone, as a plume/ from a bone-fire, as a flume of ravens/ startled from a battle-tree—this lantern resin/ the monk culls from soot to quill the doom/ and glory of the Lord won’t fade"). The strongest of the lot however were probably those like "Ofermod" and "Fortunes of Men", which bring together the contemporary colloquial and the high-poetic of the Middle Ages to make something that really sings.