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Open Books: Event Archive
March 18, 2007 03:00 PM
MARY CORNISH & NANCY PAGH
Mary Cornish's Red Studio ($14.95 Oberlin) is a book of lyric
poetry firmly grounded in art and loss. A piece early in the book reports on
the immediate aftermath of the death of her husband, a loss which then
haunts the whole volume. Many of her poems are studies of pieces of art. In
one she writes of a Japanese painter who, "asked to paint crows flying
across four sliding doors, / . painted a crow's wing / disappearing from
the fourth," an apt correlative for her work. The abundance of absence and
memory in these poems is matched by a respect for, and love of, art -- "The
fact that Giotto's nave has fallen, / doesn't mean it wasn't really heaven."
Ms. Cornish's work presents the objects she sees, and the loss she feels, in
sharp focus.
No Sweeter Fat ($14.95 Autumn House) is Nancy Pagh's strong first
collection of poetry. A Northwesterner born and bred, her imagery comes from
the animal- and plant-life and weather of this region. In her hands nature
is quite natural, palpable and blessedly non-romanticized. In "Rounding the
Point" she reports seeing "eight pairs of seals" and a few lines later
writes, "Look. There were no seals, / but sixteen bull kelp in the bay. /
Each bulb was separate as my head, / empty floats in coiling tide. / Why did
I want it otherwise?" The poetry in the book's first section concerns, in
third- and first-person, "the fat lady." These poems convincingly convey,
through direct language and thoroughly arresting imagery, the vast emotional
range, from joy to melancholy, felt by the self-aware cultural outsider.
This is rich and complex work, artistically and psychologically, ripe with
longing and longing's sibling, anger. And a wry, bittersweet sense of humor
underpins all Ms. Pagh's poems.
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