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Open Books: Event Archive
October 25, 2007 07:30 PM
OLIVER DE LA PAZ & AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL
Furious Lullaby, Oliver de la Paz's second volume ($15.95 Southern
Illinois) is richly sensual yet etched by a sharp reckoning with loss. The
collection includes a number of versions of the aubade, a poem that greets
the dawn but can also serve as a wistful acknowledgement of the parting of
lovers at daybreak. The new day brings both a beginning and an end -- "We are
gathered back into the things of this world / and turn away from the
sore-red sun, moved / to deny who we will be when we are awakened."
Mysterious and resonant, the poems pulse with light and shadow, revealing
not so much a narrative but an intensity of feeling, a questing of the mind,
a longing in the body -- "Uncertain where the glare is from, I stare / and
stare."
Aimee Nezhukumatathil's second collection, At the Drive-In Volcano
($16.95 Tupelo), can be as vivid as a lava flow and as cool and keen-edged
as obsidian, sometimes in the same poem. The varied world is a presence in
her work, certainly the Philippines and India, the lands of her parents, but
also Austria, New Orleans, St. Lucia, a bus station in the Midwest. Perhaps
most vivid is the landscape of love, with its smooth and rocky terrain. "I
will curl around you like / a pilot shrimp and you will wonder / where all
this sand is coming from." Direct in tone and sentiment, her work is laced
with humor -- "The honeymoon is over / and we find a dead lizard / in our
luggage," and pragmatically hopeful -- "Even in this darkness / there is so
much light."
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