As Brenda Hillman notes in her Introduction, Larissa Szporluk "creates an animate new universe out of cryptic original speech" in these poems. Exploring how the mind orders experience—and how disorder, or different orders, affect that experience—Szporluk has produced a poetry of alien beauty, limning worlds where the inability to exert control results in a disturbing, overwhelming immediacy.
Dark Sky Question
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Editorial Reviews
From Library Journal
It is through language more than any clear narrative structure that the poems in this first collection, winner of the 1997 Barnard New Women Poets Prize, evoke an eerie feeling of something gone awry: "A person can die of balance,/ just gleam like a squid/ and disappear." Elsewhere Szporluk speaks more clearly of violence: "And because of the cut, the distance of your life pours out,/ and because of the clouds/ like fat that surrounds you,/ you don't hear for a long time." Images of desolation create a tight weave, as a soft, persistent tone compels the reader to delve more deeply into their meaning. Even as we are warned that "in your rush to get in,/ you bruise the shape/of your body," we will be tempted to enter and reenter these poems. An excellent first collection.?Ann K. van Buren, New York Univ. Sch. of Continuing Education
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
The best series currently introducing new writers to the public.—Booklist
"How different this work is from the generic poetry of the day! Larissa Szporluk has created a new world of syntax and tone. Her poetry, free of narcissism and autobiography, indentured to the irrational and oblique, is made from a displaced language 'shaking to remember where it had owned.' I've missed this feral fineness in poetry—a clarity that is not watered-down slice of life but l'eau of stain and midnight: good strange. God Strange, too, for Szporluk is a religious poet, with her own indelible realm of awakening. Dark Sky Question arises from and speaks to the limbic portion of mind, that understory concerned with emotion and motivation, a heady linguistic space that remembers when the poem was 'a cage whose interior flew.'"—Alice Fulton, author of Dance Script with Electric Ballerina and Sensual Math
Praise for Larissa Szporluk
"Her effects are breathtaking."—Daniel L. Guillory, Library Journal
"Szporluk . . . weaves magic out of indeterminacy."—Samuel Jay Keyser, Harvard Review
"If those two strange, haunted beings, Emily Dickinson and Georg Trakl, wedded, [Szporluk's] poems might well be the offspring."—Gregory Orr
"How different this work is from the generic poetry of the day! Larissa Szporluk has created a new world of syntax and tone. Her poetry, free of narcissism and autobiography, indentured to the irrational and oblique, is made from a displaced language 'shaking to remember where it had owned.' I've missed this feral fineness in poetry—a clarity that is not watered-down slice of life but l'eau of stain and midnight: good strange. God Strange, too, for Szporluk is a religious poet, with her own indelible realm of awakening. Dark Sky Question arises from and speaks to the limbic portion of mind, that understory concerned with emotion and motivation, a heady linguistic space that remembers when the poem was 'a cage whose interior flew.'"—Alice Fulton, author of Dance Script with Electric Ballerina and Sensual Math
Praise for Larissa Szporluk
"Her effects are breathtaking."—Daniel L. Guillory, Library Journal
"Szporluk . . . weaves magic out of indeterminacy."—Samuel Jay Keyser, Harvard Review
"If those two strange, haunted beings, Emily Dickinson and Georg Trakl, wedded, [Szporluk's] poems might well be the offspring."—Gregory Orr
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A deeply beautiful book of poetry.,
By Myrtle Poplar (NJ) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Dark Sky Question (Barnard New Women Poets Series) (Paperback)
"Where he is, the jungle is still large. The things that sing, sing flight into his heart, and sky, and sun, and sounds so glad he thinks his mother was a bird..." ~ These are my favorite lines from Dark Sky Question. I love Larissa Szporluk's poetry so much. I keep the book by my bedside so I can read and reread her work. I hardly know how to express how her words have affected me. Such beauty. This is definitely one of my favorite poetry books ever.
5 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
hush... time for letting go.,
By Jack Tocco (Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Dark Sky Question (Barnard New Women Poets Series) (Paperback)
Some advice before you begin reading this book: quiet the mind. Use meditation, herbal tea, Gregorian chant, incense, a gentle rainstorm, or whatever else might help you move from the analytic rationality required by everyday life to a place of gentle suggestability. If you promise to subdue your need for intellectual understanding for just a little while and allow these intriguing poems to wash over you, the reward will be great. To call this "religious" poetry would prehaps be misleading. To be sure, the divine, mysterious connection between the human world and the spiritual world are at the root of Szporkuk's work (if anything so tangible as a root can be found), but this is not the poetry of a dogmatic zealot. Even the most devout atheist will be drawn into Szporluk's realm of metaphysical abstraction. Do not try (too much!) to identify the personal pronouns. Do not go searching for antecedents to each metaphor. Part of the brilliance here is the finesse with which the unknown is handled. Let yourself not know. Allow these odd, exciting new poems take you on an unchartered journey into the dark sky question. By all means, read this book.
3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Dark Sky Answer,
By Christopher Nicholls (Ann Arbor, MI) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Dark Sky Question (Barnard New Women Poets Series) (Paperback)
To say Larissa Szporluk's poems are difficult to enter is wrong. I think I find them hard to exit; it is the return to the "real" world that is harrowing. One can connect to her poetry within its jurisdiction, its beauty often inclusive. Rapid-fire images rake the conscious mind, and leave deep sinuous cuts in the imagination that bleed into one another. Bats, cobras, mangoes shift around each other and we are guided, we the second person for the moment. "You should have gone further," she urges. But if we go so far as to leave, the blood coagulates and the holes try to patch themselves up. We reel in our attempt to understand what, while we were inside, made sense. The spinning ceases, as we know it must in her poem "Deliverer": "No one can spin forever. / It will all slow down." A kind of death sets in as we "can't see, can't feel." And maybe this is part of the point -- that we will only experience our life from within. To leave this viewpoint is to enter an unknown world (the world of Szporluk's wonderful poetry) where we do not know what to expect: "They say you hurried for the end. / A sudden recollection lights the wind."
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