Customer Reviews

Contradictions

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Contradictions stretches a magic tightrope across various pairs of opposites: a conversational tone versus one that foregrounds language, the lyric versus the narrative, the historical versus the metaphysical, thought versus sensation.
As Corn hold his lines taut, the reader proceeds, step by step, discovering new perspectives.
In most collections it would be generous to say that two or three pieces are memorable; in Contradictions, at least a dozen poems etch themselves on the reader's memory, demanding to be reread, revealing more each time.

To a common reader, like myself, "Contradictions" may at first seem more than you can bear, the lines are so finely spun and the whole cloth blinds in its shimmering (and shifting) vision. As the book's title suggests, life and art never present a single, clear set of directions. But if you open this book and read the poems one by one, looking up unfamiliar words as the poet intended, letting your senses be pulled gently through like the rough common thread in the first poem, you'll come away with keener insight, understanding better, hearing fine cadences, feeling with all of your senses once more intact.

Mr. Corn tells us a little about our fatal flaw in his first poem. There is no common understanding without adversity fully experienced, shared and finally understood. He proceeds to share with us, as someone remaining in the heart of life - at high risk - relying on no sibyls but the souls he meets and his own trustworthy one.

Life exposes, fragments, blinds, lures, denies and traps, but this poet is no seeker of easy ways out. He takes us on a journey of new angles, weaving pieces together into a unity of being. Great themes are pieced with smaller poems. Through them, he establishes a running theme that a painstaking life (mastery) is worth its price.

Corn's "Contradictions" begin and end as a triumphant cross - a cross-weave of themes and a path cut by art through life, a textile of words that the artist carries for us to light our own paths and help us see what we might otherwise miss.

This book is a triumph of art over darkness, of heart over fragmentation, of eternal meaning over death, and in my opinion there isn't another book more perfectly timed for its private public.