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Open Books: Event Archive
June 14, 2007 07:30 PM
MARYROSE LARKIN & DONNA STONECIPHER
“Am a detective of tangents,” writes Maryrose Larkin in her new collection, The Book of Ocean ($12.95 i.e. Press). The tangents she discovers – in sound and meaning – make for lyrically inventive poems that awaken both mind and heart. Imagery of the natural world, science, and religion appears in language that is fragmented yet rich, and often richly musical – “I am oxygen sentence a mouthful of mercury / calcium invention of hollow and ocean.” The connection of human perception, of language, to world is a thread throughout – “eye opens the idea of sky,” she suggests in “Prime,” the first poem in the spare and graceful series “Book of Hours.” An acknowledgement of loss, too, gently colors the volume – “we are wholly absence swung” – though the poems continually convey engagement and embrace, a desire to “edge / even closer see / inside out.”
Donna Stonecipher’s second volume, Souvenir de Constantinople ($14 Instance Press), is a sensual and compelling book-length poem that entwines a traveler’s tale of romance with a perceptive meditation on the allure and limitation of otherness. Elegant and mysterious, it offers both the lushness of ardor and the bracing astringency of the critical mind. “We are / up late, disentangling // maps (I know there is a red sea / in you… please // impel the red sea in me),” she can write, yet also, “The seduced / sees only // herself, observed by her- / self, her most significant eye.” The possibility of risk etches the book – “Be careful, / disciple // of far. // …(how far do I have to go / to be in // Constantinople? How far / do you have to go // in to find the attar of roses of me?)” But it is the energy induced by the traveler’s – the lover’s – risk that fuels this resonant work – “the tourist rubs like a magic // lamp the thought / of home (and so splits // her existence and doubles it).”
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