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Open Books: Event Archive
March 03, 2005 07:30 PM
ANDREW ZAWACKI
The atmospheric poems of Anabranch, Andrew Zawacki's recent collection
from Wesleyan, are delicately ominous. "I believe in disquiet," Mr. Zawacki
writes in "Credo," "the pressure it plies." His philosophical yet grounded
book probes the notion of a self and its place in the world: "one of me
stuttered and one / of me broke, and one of me tried // to fasten a line to
one of / me untying it from me." Sometimes fractured, sometimes highly
lyrical, the language in _Anabranch_ is often rich-- "a singular axis
emanating order, furze bush abstaining a lurch into flame, foxglove and the
coquettish breeze it answered to by noon." One can understand why John
Ashbery has compared reading this volume to "being rowed along the corridors
of a flooded palace." Below is a poem from the book:
5 (Vertigo) from "Albedo"
There are things I would settle
with myself. Why, for instance,
as autumn unravels, I cannot mortar
myself to myself, nothing but sunlight
littered from here to the sun. By I
I mean a window, redness grazing the lake
at dawn, or an echo winnowing out
along a wall, hard pressed to hide itself
and straining for the voice it vanished from.
I mean so many windows. So much red.
--Andrew Zawacki
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