Customer Reviews

Dark Sky Question (Barnard New Women Poets Series)

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"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.

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.

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."

There is more room than you ever thought and Szporluk's book ensures that you'll see it, by using words like crow bars through sheet rock, with plenty of time and space to sit and stare at the new stars and weeds.

I haven't much to add that others haven't touched on, so I will just add my voice in saying that Ms. Szporluk's poetry is simply beautiful. These are poems meant to be read over and over. I love her style--different than a lot of poets I've read, and it works well. This truly is a book worth owning.

Reading the poetry of Larissa Szporluk can accurately be likened to wandering through the dreams of a stranger. Szporluk's laster collection Dark Sky Question is filled with mind boggling images, creating bizarre pictures of sweating monks, desperate woman and an earth that lives out a human-like exsistance, within the readers mind. The idea of a dream-like state of consciousness peppers the work, and although the actual purpose of the poems is sometimes lost to the reader, one cannot help but be struck by the awesome quality of Szporluk's prose. To read Dark Sky Question is almost like seeing a theatrical production; the viewer must drop their limiting cloak of reality and accept the given circumstances. Once they do, exploring the fantastical world of Szporluk's electrifying poetry can effect imagination and go beyond expectation.

Sylvia Plath plus Emily Dickinson equals Larisa Szporluk.

It was good overall, the insight and ideas were great, but the way it was set could've been better but I did however find myself reading a couple of them twice and not cuz they made no sense, because they made so much!

If one wants to visit a world not of our own, not that of heaven, but some alternative universe, this is the book to guide your journey. Through Szporluk's underlying theme of questioning religion, she is able to create this world. Decisive wording allows the reader to elevate to her unique vision .