Customer Reviews

Earliest Worlds: Two Books by Eleni Sikelianos

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Sikelianos' full-length debut is more than full-length: Earliest Worlds is two books in one. Its large format allows her sinuous and generous poems to fully occupy the page, making maximum use of white space. The poems themselves are exquisite explorations of language and self, innovative in their stylistics but also traditional in their concerns. Earliest Worlds is one of the most ambitious and moving works of poetry to appear recently.

Here are two big books, Blue Guide and Of Sun, Of History, Of Seeing, in one, from a poet that has up till now only put out a few very slender volumes. I didn't know Eleni Sikelianos could be so wantonly prolific, and I am very glad she is. It's good for these poems, which seem nearly weightless because they move so fast, to have a big heavy book to sit in; it makes me take them seriously, as they should be taken. Also, there's relief in the way the spaciously tensile poems can spread out. (I should note that the book, for its size, is a bargain-$14.95.)

These poems are unremorsefully gorgeous, and they joy in the gorgeous world. Sikelianos doesn't deny that tragedy exists in the world, but she's more interested in the world's structure and swift chaotic and patterned movements. I'm reminded of the seventeenth-century writer Thomas Browne's "quincunx", the 5-noded diamond-shaped figure he believed beautifully structured everything, tiny or interplanetary, in the world. Sikelianos doesn't seek a similarly unifying figure, but there is for her a lovely patterning that careeningly centers and decenters the physical and experiential world. Her version of Browne's quincunx morphs and moves, and her language manifests that phenomenology. She frequently invokes bendable parts of the human body-jaws, ankles, wrists-and similarly, any piece of a Sikelianos poem can become a syntactical joint where the structure of things morphs into something new and lovely to celebrate. Sentences will divert into a new course partway in: "We won't laugh/while you sleep like I like a book that fits through my sleeve/but what would have to do with the ocean?"

What's it feels like to read it? It's a ride through swift lateral moves between images and sounds, synesthesia, the layerings of experience that can be exhibited in language as in no other medium. Perhaps this particular gasping speed hasn't been managed since Dickinson: "...unfortunate music starts up as some errand boy throws down sex between the seas, handles the sun into some stunned girl, and rocks and coelecanths all come charging."
The specificity of the poems makes it difficult to give a sense, quoting, of the large scope of the book's gesture, which it manages without ponderousness-there's simultaneously a light touch and a large ambition. The quick-change language swings me round corners; I have a sense that everything and anything might be addressed. Still, a strong theme emerges: the body as world and the world as body. The theme gives solidity to the specificities and movements in Earliest Worlds: the point of view that directs them accepts the world and body and experience as a many-leveled Whitmanian unity-that is, a unity that is many and unbounded and ever-altering and encountering itself. Sikelianos manages to combine Dickinson's vertiginous figurations with Whitman's relaxed sprawling universals and lists.

I trust the prettiness of Sikelianos' poetry more than I trust such prettiness in some other contemporary poetry, because in Earliest Worlds, the structure of the speaker's perception as the world languages through her is beautiful. There's usually no forced molding of anything into beauty. With the speaker's wide-eyed attitude, though, comes a risk: the occasional distracting cuteness. Once in awhile, her vernacular sweetness seems overingenuous, as if she's stepped back to admire her own holy-child stance and composed a loveliness that is suspiciously lovely. That's rare; usually, Sikelianos' Zen beginner's mind sends dispatches of funny, zooming beauty.

[This review appeared in Interim in 2002.]