Poetry. A comprehensively stunning book. Novel, play or poem, this landmark work jumps vividly to life with quirky invention, concentrated integrity and charming humor. Conference also teems with lyric passages: "Once there's an opening, there's absence. Departure. Open your mouth: you could walk through. The sky's an illusion and I'm perhaps legion. Yes or no. An opening is the nick of time, maybe, and clouds' job is to stave that off, in a huge collaboration with illusion. The sky is illusion: that's evident: agreed. This blinding is beauty's definition perhaps, and its reasons too. Still, things fall through. All fall through. Open your mouth then or if not." Stacy Doris has written her grand d'oeuvre, a magnificent wonder. Doris' recent PARAMOUR is also available from SPD.
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Updating Conference of the Birds, the long poem on the search for an avian king by 12th-century Persian Sufi Farid ud-Din Attar, Doris (Paramour) dives deeply into a world infused with a supernal lightness that trembles with immanent and imminent violence, where genocidal logic and the logic of fear and of love seem to be the same: "We stumbled here from out of the blue, I suppose, and that's what's ravished. I wanted to prove that nothing is love, perhaps. Perhaps it is and perhaps I wanted to. At least like the others, I've never been able to go on. Instead, glide. And if you absolutely must give thanks for something, thank fear: fear keeps us what and how we are: mostly not looking." The many characters the poem speaks through are represented by invented glyphs; one of them, a sort of calligraphic "o," is defined as "Dad = Dad, all varieties, + all Yiddish folk songs," while "Drab," "Bird" and "Attar" himself make appearances as well. The splitting of the book's excessive digressions, plays-within-plays, songs and wise admonishments among these "characters" reads like a Babel of voices working laconically to describe the world; it's a kind of taxonomy that speaks, where each speech is elevated to the level of philosophical precis, suggesting a metaphysical schemata or key for resolution which never materializes: "Where there's no logic left, there's life, logic's opposite." Doris's modus operandi is one of constant reinvention, so that a daughter "cradling her penis," talking crows or putative transcripts from EgyptAir's doomed flight 990 (the book was completed before September 11) are not bizarre window-dressing on a conventional style, but a pathos-ridden expression of trauma, a talking through the wound of harrowing engagement with 20th-century life. Her secular mysticism, laced with a rich ironic humor and propelled by a masterly, ludic semantics, is unlike anything else in poetry today.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
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