The line between poetry (the delicate, surprising not-quite) and
the essay (the emphatic what-about and so-there!) is thin, easily
crossed. Both the poem and the essay work beyond a human sense of
time. Both welcome a deep mulling-over, endlessly mixing image and
idea and running with scissors; certainly each distrusts the notion
of premise or formulaic progression. The essays in The Little Death
of Self emerged by way of an odd detail or bothersome question that
would not quit- Why does the self grow smaller as the poem grows
enormous, or as quiet as a half-second of genuine discovery? Why
does closure in a poem so often mean keep going, so what if the
world is ending! Must we stalk the poem or does the poem stalk us
until the world clicks open? Boruch's intrepid curiosity led her to
explore fields of expertise about which she knew little; then,
perhaps through her reading, observation, and conversations with
thoughtful people, she knew enough to be forgiven for delving into
areas such as aviation, music, anatomy, history, medicine,
photography, fiction, neuroscience, physics, anthropology,
painting, and drawing. There's an addiction to metaphor here, an
affection for image, sudden turns of thinking, and the great
subjects of poetry: love, death, time, knowledge. There's amazement
at the dumb luck of staying long enough in an inkling to make it a
thought or a poem at all. Poets such as Keats, Stevens, Frost,
Plath, Auden, and Bishop, along with painters, inventors, doctors,
scientists, composers, musicians, neighbors, friends, and
family-all traffic blatantly or under the surface-and one gets a
glimpse of such fellow travelers now and then. The essays collected
in The Little Death of Self are meditations toward poetry by a poet
who finds this mysterious genre the weirdest, most compelling of
all human ways to imagine-or fathom-the great world.
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