Composed
as a series of four long poems, Megan Kaminski's new book Desiring Map (Coconut Books) meditates on the embodied I/eye and
the ground of its condition: a language of reverie, it is densely constructed of
images drawn from the landscapes of their origin -- Florida, the northwest
coast, and, dominantly, the Kansas plains.
These poems direct the reader's eye along an "estuarial
intent" across "snips of nodding aster and cow lily," over
fields of "silky prairie clover...[and] sand verbena". "An atlas
of trees in far away fields" signaling to us, her poems catalog the human
and natural worlds, holding them up for us to see each anew. Deployed within a
rich vocabulary of slipping registers, the poet composites a new textural space
from myriad sources: lyric language, natural history, Spanish phrases, slang,
technical jargon, and archaisms, recuperating language as a means of
recuperating landscape. Kaminsky assures
us, "yesterday nothing was unusual." Indeed, her language is neither more nor less strange than the "spring rains....[which] remind us of
the speaking world."
lawns stretch ready around
small
bodies caught in orbit
each
afternoon contains a pause
waiting
for our pulse to break
Within
the pages of this Desiring Map, Kaminski
offers poems of witness to "beauty as it decomposes," a world
breaking open upon the leaves of her book. She warns us, "if I am to speak
of them I must leave / the body
this place this
tongue." Departures of a geographical
desire seeking its ground, these poems return the strange loveliness of the
world to us, while we "turn soft and dark and eat raw persimmons" by
their light.
No comments:
Post a Comment