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Cloisters

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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.

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.

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

This book of poetry is so beautifully written I found myself opening it up again and again. Each read opens more visual doors. This author certainly knows how to play words off of each other because the phrasing is remarkable. I have given this as a gift to several people and they raved about it. Hard to compare to anything, but sometimes reminded me of Bob Dylan's lyrics.

There are a lot of short poems in this book & some prose poems, but within each small offering is a strong choice of word & a smooth flow, which extends throughout the entire collection. There are new ways of phrasing things. Some of my favorites are "a river of rented trees" & also, "as if you were a piano at the bottom of a lake." At times, the poems & punch of the last lines relate to the beginnings of the poems, at times, it varies, but each similiarity is based upon a haiku-like poem which starts off each chapter. This is a strong debut & has a new way of looking at otherwise boring events/instances/objects in the world. A good sample for those that are interested in interpretation.

Even if you're not into poetry, the beautiful, powerful word choice of the author draws you to a secluded otherworld of emotion. Bravo!