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Open Books: Event Archive
February 08, 2007 07:30 PM
PAISLEY REKDAL
The opening poem of Paisley Rekdal's third collection, The Invention of
the Kaleidoscope ($14 University of Pittsburgh Press), suggests the bracing
waters we are about to enter. Though benignly titled "Strawberry," it
begins, "I am going to fail. / I'm going to fail cartilage and plastic,
camera and arrow.. / I'm going to fail the way strawberry plants fail."
Whether narrative or lyric, her work is forthright, at times humorous, and
often searingly honest. The title poem is a fractured narrative -- a kind of
kaleidoscope itself -- that intermingles details of the life of Sir David
Brewster, inventor of the kaleidoscope, with those of a failing
relationship -- "I wanted to reconstruct, re- / member myself out of shards
of glass. / I said: I wanted to write a body out of light." Yet her poetry
is never nihilistic, offering, "praise begins when pain / transfigures
itself."
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