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A review by richardwells
The Blue Tower by Michael Biggins, Tomaž Šalamun
5.0
I gave this book five stars because it's been a wonderful chore reading something that I don't get it - not by a long shot. It is, in fact, incomprehensible. Not that I don't understand the words - they are in english, not that I don't understand whole sentences, and even find some of them beautiful and moving; I just don't understand what any of the poems is supposed to be about, except, perhaps, the futility of any poem being about any thing. I've tried. I went back into Mr. Salumun's past work, and found poems I understood. Found one poem, The Shepherd, to be quite beautiful; beautiful and scary. And I've discovered that Mr. Salumun has some highly prestigious fans, so they must understand what I don't. The back cover of the book contains the sentence: In The Blue Tower, language is remade with tenderness and abandon. I'm not sure I know what that means, either, but I took it as a sort of clue.
The collection has a cast of characters that repeat through the 55 poems, and the poems do seem to track a life, but... As an experiment I took the third line of the first ten poems and constructed a new poem - it seemed to make as much total sense as any of the other poems in the book. And then I thought I found the key in the 47th poem in the collection, and oddly enough, a poem in which I could suss out a disjointed sort of meaning. The key was this quote: "Art is a present the only construction complete unto itself, about which nothing more can be said, such is its richness, vitality, sense, wisdom. Understanding, seeing. Describing a flower: relative poetry more or less paper flower. Seeing." And so I stepped back from meaning, looked at a random poem as a construction, and found some sort of evocative sense, until I moved on to the next poem, and decided: these are not evocative, they're a jumble.
And there you have it, if the brilliance is only seen by a few is it brilliant? Yes, it is.
The collection has a cast of characters that repeat through the 55 poems, and the poems do seem to track a life, but... As an experiment I took the third line of the first ten poems and constructed a new poem - it seemed to make as much total sense as any of the other poems in the book. And then I thought I found the key in the 47th poem in the collection, and oddly enough, a poem in which I could suss out a disjointed sort of meaning. The key was this quote: "Art is a present the only construction complete unto itself, about which nothing more can be said, such is its richness, vitality, sense, wisdom. Understanding, seeing. Describing a flower: relative poetry more or less paper flower. Seeing." And so I stepped back from meaning, looked at a random poem as a construction, and found some sort of evocative sense, until I moved on to the next poem, and decided: these are not evocative, they're a jumble.
And there you have it, if the brilliance is only seen by a few is it brilliant? Yes, it is.