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kell_xavi 's review for:
Nightingale
by Paisley Rekdal
This collection is much like the pear: pale, crisp, sometimes juicy and fragrant, often dry and elusive in flavour.
the cool flesh
cellular or stony, white
as the belly of the winter hare
or the doe's scut, flicking,
before she mates. (Pear)
The cover is a gorgeous trace of the poems: the body, often female, made into art or seized or looked intimately upon or showing up in blank, stark language.
Perhaps the greatest desire a victim of violence has is to look at the violence dispassionately in memory. But remembering, the heart pounds, the body floods with adrenaline, ready to tear back off into flight... Poetry, with its suggestions that time and pain can be ordered through language, strains to constrain suffering. It suggests, but rarely achieves, the redress we desire. (Nightingale)
Paisley Rekdal writes a wonderful story. At the level of craft, she is a strong writer, intelligent and controlled in recited passages and original images—I have studied Ovid’s Philomela, and took some interest in Rekdal’s theory-driven personalization of the myth. But the poems that her stories take the form of are many times washed away, without closing or reaching their climax. Without spreading completely. Some of them attempt newness through the unusual body, another kind of metamorphosis: I didn’t like how “Io” approached disability, I wasn’t sure about where “Tireseus” was growing from.
I did like it, but the joy and longing I had from the five or six poems that ignited my senses—
The tree traffics
in a singular astonishment, its gold tongues
lolling out a song so rich and sweet, the notes
are left to rot upon the pavement. (Psalm (!!))
—wasn’t satisfied by the rest.
The best (for me):
Psalm
Four Marys
Nightingale
The Olive Tree at Vouves
Driving to Santa Fe
Pear
the cool flesh
cellular or stony, white
as the belly of the winter hare
or the doe's scut, flicking,
before she mates. (Pear)
The cover is a gorgeous trace of the poems: the body, often female, made into art or seized or looked intimately upon or showing up in blank, stark language.
Perhaps the greatest desire a victim of violence has is to look at the violence dispassionately in memory. But remembering, the heart pounds, the body floods with adrenaline, ready to tear back off into flight... Poetry, with its suggestions that time and pain can be ordered through language, strains to constrain suffering. It suggests, but rarely achieves, the redress we desire. (Nightingale)
Paisley Rekdal writes a wonderful story. At the level of craft, she is a strong writer, intelligent and controlled in recited passages and original images—I have studied Ovid’s Philomela, and took some interest in Rekdal’s theory-driven personalization of the myth. But the poems that her stories take the form of are many times washed away, without closing or reaching their climax. Without spreading completely. Some of them attempt newness through the unusual body, another kind of metamorphosis: I didn’t like how “Io” approached disability, I wasn’t sure about where “Tireseus” was growing from.
I did like it, but the joy and longing I had from the five or six poems that ignited my senses—
The tree traffics
in a singular astonishment, its gold tongues
lolling out a song so rich and sweet, the notes
are left to rot upon the pavement. (Psalm (!!))
—wasn’t satisfied by the rest.
The best (for me):
Psalm
Four Marys
Nightingale
The Olive Tree at Vouves
Driving to Santa Fe
Pear