Reluctant Gravities [Paperback]

Rosmarie Waldrop (Author)

Book Description

Series: New Directions Paperbook | Publication Date: October 1999

Once again poet and translator Rosmarie Waldrop pushes the boundaries and definitions of poetry, prose, gender, relationship, even language itself in her new volume of prose poem "dialogues," Reluctant Gravities. Intended as a sequel to The Reproduction of Profiles and Lawn of Excluded Middle, Reluctant Gravities gives the rhetorical "you" addressed in those earlier volumes a voice and response. "I decided to give the second person equal time," says Waldrop. "But I'm not interested in characters, psychology, or in poetry's traditional 'persona' or mask. The voices do not 'represent,' but frame the synaptic space between them." Some of Waldrop's concerns are formal. She "cultivates cuts, discontinuity, leaps, shifts of reference" in her attempts to compensate for the lack of a margin, where verse would turn toward the white of the page, toward what is not. Her "gap gardening tries to place the margin, the emptiness inside the text." But the point of the dialogues is purely human as the two voices with wit and philosophical playfulness debate aspects of "Aging," "Depression," "Desire," and even "The Millennium."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A wonderful mix of philosophical conversation, erotic questions and astrophysical speculation, the latest volume of genre-blurring prose poetry from Waldrop (Lawn of Excluded Middle) continues the intellective experiment that now spans her 40-odd years and 15 books. "Born as an afterthought," Waldrop states, "I doubt propositions without body heat or shadow." As in Lawn, her jumpy, startling, abstract sentences seek to interrogate ordinary notions of logic, reference, grammar and truth. Where many American poets flee scientific realism for bodily or religious transcendence, Waldrop's work plays intellect off against itself, appealing to chaos theory, non-Euclidian geometry and contemporary cosmology in order to undermine ordinary ideas about language, truth and logic: "the crow does not fly as the crow flies." The book's unusual structure continues the explorations its lines and sentences embody. Each of six sections includes four prose "conversations"; between each section and the next comes an "interlude," consisting of a "song" in short-lined verse, a "meditation" and another song. Waldrop depicts swerving and desire, particle anihilation and creation, braiding phenomenology with physics: "the hawk's plummet smears the gap visible, a scar to be deciphered as force of attraction. Or gravity." Waldrop's difficult quidditities gesture toward the European experimenters she has translated, notably Edmond Jab?s. Her new work's mixed genres also recall the William Carlos Williams of Spring and All, as do her remarkable insistences on the physical, material force of words. Her defiantly brilliant speculations, ready for vigorous readers to decipher, retain an attraction all their own.(Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"This influential avant-garde doyenne ... handily manages the paradox of the lucid enigma ... She maintains a distinctly American voice -- quick-witted, conversational, and visually concrete ... a poetry that pleases no less than it puzzles" -- Voice Literary Supplement

Reluctant Gravities provokes us to re-imagine loss and possession, what is is--parents, youth, memory -- we lose as we age, and what it is -- language, gender, desire -- that possesses us. -- Forrest Gander, The Providence Sunday Journal, 2 January 2000

Conversation 10: On Separation
Conversation 11: On Depth
Conversation 12: On Hieroglyphs
Conversation 13: On Ways Of The Body
Conversation 14: On Blindman's Buff
Conversation 15: On Sharing
Conversation 16: On Change
Conversation 17: On Lift
Conversation 18: On Depression
Conversation 19: On Childhood
Conversation 1: On The Horizontal
Conversation 20: On Pattern
Conversation 21: On Slowing
Conversation 22: On Aging
Conversation 23: On Cause
Conversation 24: On The Millennium
Conversation 2: On The Vertical
Conversation 3: On Vertigo
Conversation 4: On Place
Conversation 5: On Eden
Conversation 6: On Desire
Conversation 7: On Thirds
Conversation 8: On Betweens
Conversation 9: On Varieties Of Oblivion
Meditation On Certainty
Meditation On Fact
Song 1
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

Defying the gravity of their print on the page with a peculiar buoyancy, the poems seem to breathe... -- American Book Review, Krysia Jopek, September/October 2000

The voice(s) that govern the text unstintingly refuse conclusion... -- Boston Review, Ann Humphreys, October/November 2000

This influential avant-garde doyenne, whose translations of Edmond Jabs were seminal events in postwar American poetry handily manages [in Another Language: Selected Poems] the paradox of the lucid enigma....She maintains a distinctly American voice--quick-witted, conversational, and visually concrete...a poetry that pleases no less than it puzzles. -- "Our 25 Favorite Books of 1997," The Village Voice Literary Supplement

Waldrop...demonstrates how vital the prose poem can be in the hands of someone who fully understands it. -- Harvard Review), William Doreski, Spring 2000

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation; 1 edition (October 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811214281
• ISBN-13: 978-0811214285
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.3 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #709,832 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The mystery of conversation in poetry, November 10, 2002

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Dawn (Miami, FL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Reluctant Gravities (Paperback)

Reluctant Gravities gives the reader a series of two voice conversations of debate that fashions concrete images and manages to also puzzle in the same instant. Each conversation is interrupted by poetic interludes that are often lovely breaks from the witty and often enigmatic conversations about "Aging," "Desire," and "Depression," among other topics. Reluctant Gravities is indeed "reluctant" to allow itself to be fully understood by the reader and refuses conclusion.