Kristin Bocks potent and undeniably original voice sings through this award-winning first collection. Enticing readers with transcendental pastorals, her spare wordplay is tinged with gothic imagery yet laced with an easy innocence. These are poems that enlighten and arouse, assuring us that if nothing on Earth may be taken at face value, neither may anything be taken for granted or lost.
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Editorial Reviews
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Cloisters is a book that creates a sense of largeness despite its small borders. . . . Bocks language is exquisite, wooing us into one lyric after another so swiftly that, even though we may not know where we are, we trust that Ms. Bock most certainly does. The effect is a book of almost God-like proportions: poems that we can observe and perceive but arent exactly certain we can fully understand. . . . Cloisters takes us into a world that at times seems secular and, at other times, clearly emanates from the spiritual; something akin to the afterlife, prayer. Cloisters is a book that not only explores but mimics the mysteries of human experience. We are the better for it.--review by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum, Rattle
Kristin Bocks marvelous debut collection enacts an aesthetic of discrete moments, offering her reader an intelligence that works simultaneously upon the heart and at the margins of experience. The perspective here is edgy, nervous, compelling, and wise. In the pared delicacy of these poems, we discover both exceptional nuance and resonancethese are poems that trust their readers, poems that dont oversell their emotions or perceptions. Kristin Bocks poems are like the shards of a mirror that magically reflect a whole person, a whole woman, a whole mind and sensibility at work in the world. As in all of the best volumes of poetry, we come to admire the person in these poems, her vision and her character.David St. John, judge of the 7th Annual Tupelo Press First Book Award --Review
From the Inside Flap
Kristin Bock's potent and undeniably original voice sings throughout this award-winning first collection of poetry. Deftly weaving images and symbols, Bock entices us with striking, transcedently unusual pastorals. The poet's spare wordplay is subtly tinged with gothic imagery, cloaked with an easy innocence, and yet laced with visceral insights that offers the double rewards of wisdom and depth. This compelling new voice, brimming with raw emotional power, a voice that effortlessly enlightens and arouses, assuring the reader that if nothing on Earth may be taken at face value, neither may it be taken for granted or for lost.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Dreams of Broken Love and Exquisite Sorrow,
This review is from: Cloisters (Perfect Paperback)
Awash with the beauty and detail of the natural world, Kristin Bock's poems enclose us in pastoral settings, entrancing us with the delicate splendor of a crown of bees, butterflies scribbling in the grass, or a canopy of camperdown elm, only to surprise us with a sharp dread or horror of a dark seed hidden inside this beauty, Blake's worm in the rose, staining, rotting and ultimately destroying it. This dread lingers with us long after the poem is finished and lends a dreamlike quality to the work. Indeed, each poem is a carefully constructed hallucination, at once foreign and familiar, drawn from a mythic foundation.
These poems look back to the very beginning, reaching deep into an ancient time and bucolic setting to pull from the dirt and hold up the human condition, transcending time and place, for our examination. Bock's poems are both lush and economical. Her images arrest us. They cast a spell on us, placing us firmly in a time so iconic that we at once identify with the emotions described there, we feel the echo of age-old tragedy reverberating through us even as we sit in our small city apartments, traffic sounds rising from below. Nature is everywhere throughout the poems, and we are constantly touching it with our fingertips and brushing against it with our cheeks. Its impassive beauty both inspires reverence and crushes us with its unforgiving cycle of budding innocence, and decay and death. Many of the poems have a painterly feel, but inside the idyllic setting something dark and wandering lurks. Beauty is not to be trusted for it contains its own seed of destruction and if we fall for it, it will destroy us with it. Many of the poems depict sorrow for love lost. Some poems cry out with anger and disappointment at a heartless forsaking God. But we cannot help loving this God anymore than we cannot but love the lover lost--even when they have abandoned us so cruelly. With their emphasis on Beauty, Nature, and the Divine, the poems have a Pre-Raphaelite feel and indeed Bock is a modern Christina Rosetti. As in Rossetti's paintings, darkness exists inside of light, but instead of doves and pomegranates, we have rotting apples, quiet curled asps and sadistic toy ballerinas. A cloister is a shelter that protects the one inside, providing a safe place for convalescence and meditation. The subjects in Kristin Bock's poems find such havens in the glory of field and glen and there they can tend to their wounds and emerge as survivors of "careless gleaners who leave their sickles n the earth like thorns." For us, the book itself provides a cloister--a place to which we may escape to examine the fragility of love and experience exquisite sorrow, if only for an afternoon.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Cloisters,
This review is from: Cloisters (Perfect Paperback)
Cloisters is a modern re-appraisal of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The speakers of Kristin Bock's poems evoke a Christine Rossetti who has said goodbye to the men's club, goodbye to Victorian constraints, farewell to the grand arguments of the day, while still holding them all terribly dear. From the window of her gothic retreat, she pines wistfully like a Romantic heroine for a love lost, but she surprises the reader with an uncourtly resolution to patch up her wounded heart and carry on, even if some of the rancor of the spurned is sewn within its chambers.
This new Rossetti is no anchorite though. She, like her spiritual brothers, finds consolation and regeneration in the natural world. Many poems in this book are characterized by a painterly fondness for the denizens of the meadow. Artifice is weighed against nature, the poem against the emotion; the speakers seem to know they are in poems that are doomed to fail in their attempt to capture even the smallest sublimities of forms perfected by nature, perhaps, the Christian god, maybe. The speakers here are supplicants prostrated before their grief, beauty, their deity, the natural world. It's not hard to picture some of them as drowned Ophelia, strewn with weeds and flowers. But these Ophelias stick around for the last word and are there to describe the aftermath at Elsinore. There are Sleeping Beauties here in their glass coffins; however, one suspects they may have hidden hammers and no intention of waiting eternally for the prince. There is a Medieval sensibility to some of these poems. Some are tapestry-like tableaux of damsels in bowers, awaiting billets-doux. Others sort out the natural world, looking for auguries and symbols that will help make sense of murky moods. These poems, these damsels, though, are not the ideal, chaste creatures of courtly, unconsummated love. They are knowing, worldly, bruised and tender. They have regrets and are unspared by troubles. Yet they would do it all over again and suffer just as much, since they have learned something about mortality.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent,
This review is from: Cloisters (Perfect Paperback)
Terrific poems, these move in arcs and circles where epiphanies happen softly. These cloisters are built of loss, but also hope, and their objects are essential and mythic. There is suggested here always the cold inside the heat, the thaw inside the freeze, the life already beginning to awaken under the snow. Resonant poems which reflect the silence that only significant poetry can achieve. Cloisters
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