1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Descartes Nightmare, April 24, 2011
This review is from: Descartes' Nightmare (Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry) (Paperback)
DESCARTES' NIGHTMARE University of Utah Press 2008
In McCabe's ambitious and macabre second collection , the author
drops her plumbline into squid ink and nightmare -- well , that
is , into the post - Cartesian splits , and these are legion ,
between body and soul , flesh and imagination , viscera and
thinking . With peculiar-magnificent x-file to gothic ( that is
chartreuse to amber) preserved - in- a - lab - bottle light sources ,
McCabe offers her 21st century update on nightmares .
Through first speaker , Sybil , no ordinary overseer or taxonomist,
but a "nightmarist by trade," McCabe collects unexpected treasure and
debris from the unconscious ; actually, it is in her dreamers ` taboos
that the book finds its dynamic psychic energy ; the poet is able
to pulse in penumbra spaces between waking and imagination .
Welcome to her underground , underwater world -- the more one looks
into Descartes' Nightmare , the bigger it gets . As a poet ,
McCabe is agile and thoroughgoing ( Capricornian intense ) ,
able to bring up so much , an archetypal plethora , through
fragmented strata of the intimate dream narratives ,
explorations into soul , war , dismemberment , death , dying , blood ,
limbs , brain , -- the mind strains ( but lusciously ) -- heart ,
ethers , air , spirit , drug/s , art ,water , even creating with "
bits of mosaic " .
Lifting some poems as if from the wet retina of the eye , her
atmosphere is also lyric , fluid . Water , a character all its own
, in fact , makes appearances ( fluid , blood , ink , sea , original
soul conditions ) as what flows beneath the " Fortnight Bridge
" when " swimmers come from all directions / the sparkling water
slips into the void I am opening / ; " " in climes of caffeine ; "
to where was she " before she sang in liquid choirs ? " with a
way " to speak / by unseen waves and wires and bells " and
beneath " river flowers staring from far under . " Water also
finds Hart Crane who "swallowed all the dawns he could, " drowning
in the river "stepping into us , " Mesmer identifying the "Ebbing
midnight ' universal fluid. " and the speaker herself making " her
hands water . "
But more subtly , as if behind the reader 's back , McCabe also
takes up mortality , threading the question " who made this body
made this soul " with the fear of annihilation : "(B)rains are
exchanged , the sleeping and the waking, all contact zones ironed out "
(" Unfinished Horror Movie " ) -- and with nonbeing : " This is
one flung - open with arteries half - undone / . . . The box spills its
contents , cards fly off , / maps didn't gather "
( " Rue Descartes " ).
Throughout Descartes ` Nightmare , one enjoys such sharp images
and their refractions , also sensing they have been
(beautifully ) hard won : "Stretched with an air that withdraws --
can't you stay behind the burden ? " and the dream (in its '
fellowship ' to the question , as two partners can become
question to the other's question ) answers : " That's the
dream saying / rose petals fell where my pillow lay . " Turning
her ' eye ' upon the nightmare , experience that tries to wake
us up , McCabe enacts humanness , the courageous act , eye ,
spectres , nightmare , song , all truth muscles .
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
