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Open Books: Events
March 29, 2009 03:00 PM
ENDI BOGUE HARTIGAN & SUSAN PARR
One Sun Storm ($15.95 Center for Literary Publishing), Endi Bogue Hartigan’s first book, received the Colorado Prize for Poetry, and is, as judge Martha Ronk noted, “enveloping,” its reader “immersed…in the striving toward a clarity that crystallizes and then evaporates.” Long lines play out across the large, square page, providing a visual rhythm, while a series of haikus gives a crisp counterpoint. Through accretion, layering, repetition, the poems build to quiet intensity as they circle the domestic, the natural world, a distant war -- “One orange peel left on a counter, curvature intact / One memory, one enemy, one forest, one sun / One arrival through the green door into tangled nasturtiums.”
Susan Parr’s first book, Pacific Shooter ($16.95 Pleiades Press), was selected for publication by Susan Mitchell, who boldly challenged, “The bourgeois reader will hate it: there’s too much magic, too much genius, too much linguistic bliss.” Bubbling with character and characters (Auntie Phillips, a physicist at his stove, a knight “sleepy and ferrous”), the poems are mellifluous and edgily playful, sly, complex interrogations of things, people, situations. Here is “Swooping Actuarial Fauna” -- “They blow downwind. / Quivering bulletins, / Details in a coil, / A many-thing, / Chosen by by-paths, / Shadows falling / To statistical stalls— / Whistling wherewithals.” To read this book is to be knocked off your pegs, swept along -- “Detonate backdrop. / All’s adrift.”
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