Here the text or the poem is a swimming pool, a pool in which
language or thought-as-body glide through cultural and or
phenomenological spaces; fluid places for being, thinking or even
swimming in the world. It is polyglot within English, let alone in
relation to all the other tongues that are almost audible and to
the maps of Europe that move to and fro somewhere beneath the text.
"This is a wonderful, extraordinary poem in so many ways, not quite
like anything I know, though reminding me to go back, perhaps, to
the Blake of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in its embrace of
contraries, in its repeated transformation of either/or into
both/and, of polarity as requiring both poles, of binaries as
always inseparably fused into generous - and generative -
singularities, of affirmation as inseparable from negation and vice
versa, of interiority as always ambivalently yoked to exteriority,
of literalness as layered into metaphor, memory, even allegory, of
I as always superimposed on I, of person and voice as moving around
in the fluidity of language and social exchange. No wonder that the
poem here makes such recourse to layering, folding, piling,
refraining, riffing on instabilities in grammatical class (often
reaching for a verb from the interior of a noun, for example),
concatenating the resulting variations in a singing continuity
rather than a stumbling uncertainty between them. Nothing here is
ever as simple as an unambiguous noun. What on earth, in the name
of currency, is a pool? Occasionally a simple, and for that reason
seductive, image is glimpsed: for a moment there is the clarity of
a single swimmer's body cutting a line through water, and then that
clarity is not so much lost - it never is - but disallowed the
status of whole, as ungenerous within these shifting overlays. The
literal is thus inseparable from metaphor, perhaps also from
allegory, since all is set in motion by a cumulative aggregation -
though always already in motion -, moving in and through the long
poem-paragraphs, which themselves pile up in breath-defying
sentences that themselves keep accumulating on the principle of
echo, inclusiveness, alternation, always refusing to settle, even
into a narrative possibility that at times beckons. Is this a
richness, a playfulness between different potentials that surround
one, that is only fully available to a true polyglot (Nabokov is
explicitly there in the text, though as lepidopterist; Caroline
Bergvall isn't, but was in my mind). I do think the poem - for I
think of it as single poem, with poems inside it and beside it, -
is very special." -John Hall "This poetry carries a hand-full of
soft stones that sink and surface, shiver between decomposition and
preservation as she dries herself to recall movement through
surfaces beneath and above them. This is a sustained interrogation
of the construction of a self that is intricate; intimate as much
as broad ranged; larger than the pool the poet enters; and up
against melancholy as a prospectus on beauty or the unattainable.
The poem compels attention to itself as it expands, alliterates,
rhymes, moves off at tangent and is wonderfully obsessive. Pool is
polis and micro-thought, dense and reconciled. It demands frailty
and errors of perception that become portentous and then elusive in
moth flickers, expansive and pulled into itself, frightened and
pervasive. The book celebrates a powerful engagement." -Allen
Fisher
General
Imprint: |
Shearsman Books
|
Country of origin: |
United Kingdom |
Release date: |
October 2017 |
Authors: |
Agnes Lehoczky
|
Dimensions: |
210 x 140 x 9mm (L x W x T) |
Format: |
Paperback
|
Pages: |
148 |
ISBN-13: |
978-1-84861-542-7 |
Categories: |
Books
|
LSN: |
1-84861-542-6 |
Barcode: |
9781848615427 |
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