poetry "the sheer ethics of sensation" (O Broumas)
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"'Facts are good for you,' Nora Mitchell writes in Proofreading the Histories, 'like spinach or vitamins,' and in a wide-ranging collection of poems from lyric, to chant, to elegy, to song she surprises and sometimes stuns the reader with the force of her lines and her vision. Her subjects range from Virginia Woolf writing during the Second War, to old dyke bars, to meditative poems about her mother, who died when the poet was very young." -- Ron Schreiber
"Nora Mitchell's poems swing the soul in a sensory vortex whose syllables are berries on a forest floor of artifact and rubble yet whose vines draw struggle and image from a water purified by memory and the sheer ethics of sensation in a relentless bombardment." -- Olga Broumas
"To fall is a form of wanting," writes Nora Mitchell in Proofreading the Histories. And much of her poetry in this collection is about just that falling falling into the past, out of love, into "smoky dive dyke bars," and into and out of pain, primarily the pain of hunger and longing. This book is filled with a yearning to put the pieces back together after the initial shock of pain, whether it's a mother's death, alcoholism, or a lover's absence. In this way, the book succeeds. It also succeeds in what may be considered a very self-conscious presentation of language, emblematic of the poet's quest to find meaning and release in her story.
"Nora Mitchell's poems swing the soul in a sensory vortex whose syllables are berries on a forest floor of artifact and rubble yet whose vines draw struggle and image from a water purified by memory and the sheer ethics of sensation in a relentless bombardment." -- Olga Broumas
"To fall is a form of wanting," writes Nora Mitchell in Proofreading the Histories. And much of her poetry in this collection is about just that falling falling into the past, out of love, into "smoky dive dyke bars," and into and out of pain, primarily the pain of hunger and longing. This book is filled with a yearning to put the pieces back together after the initial shock of pain, whether it's a mother's death, alcoholism, or a lover's absence. In this way, the book succeeds. It also succeeds in what may be considered a very self-conscious presentation of language, emblematic of the poet's quest to find meaning and release in her story.
In recovering the "bones" of the past, Mitchell seeks to "Proofread the Histories" of her past, stating, "I start at the end, proofread backwards,/ and go slowly, since it's easy to see what isn't there/ and infer the words from sounds I do not hear." Throughout Mitchell's book, there is a self-conscious recognition of the poet's perception and its limitations. But it is by way of Mitchell's reflectiveness that the poems are made most accessible and meaningful to the reader. Proofreading the Histories is both personal and engaging without being too sentimental or too cynical." -- Mickey MacAdam, Hurricane Alice, Winter 1998
After I Quiet Drinking
After Rain
The Bat
Blackbird Season
Dear_____
Everything And Nothing
Exempt
The Fire
Fireflies
Forest Of Roses
Grace Notes
In Sussex
Incandescence
Insomnia
Learning To Sing
Mimicry
Monarchs In Winter
October
Offerings
Proofreading The Histories
Reverie While Giving Blood
Riding With Strangers
Riffraff
Slow Motion
Still Knit The Bones
Sweet, Sweet Darling
This Flat Earth
What Comes Next
Why Horses Sleep Standing Up
Wrestling With The Angel
You Are There
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®
From the Back Cover
Proofreading the Histories fuses personal and public life. These speakers may wish for privacy, but the public world, with all its ethical and emotional demands, always encroaches. In these poems the bedroom is wired straight to the street. The vocabulary is direct, accessible, at times surreal, musically and visually rich, and situated in real history and real politics, even though dream continually intrudes. The title poem was nominated for a 1994 Pushcart Prize.
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