Customer Reviews

The Sense Record and Other Poems

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I picked up The Sense Record with great interest, after enjoying the exploration into poetic gestures in her previous book, Imagination Verses. The Sense Record reads as a decided continuation of the poems in Imagination Verses (which, at times, had a feeling of being too much "mask" and not enough "face" if that makes sense), as well as a quantum leap "forward" in vividness, and strength of line. I put "forward" in quotation marks because so much of Moxley's entire body of work is a playful critique of the entire avant-guardist notion of forward progress in the arts in the first place. Not in a conservative manner, of course, but rather in the way that a poem can create its own relationship to a reader by evoking, but not being limited to, a poetic tradition of gesture and utterance. Which is, in a big way, utterly subversive. Poems in The Sense Record that SEEM lyrical have a core to them that refuses a lyrical bent at all. For Moxley, words (esp. "heightened" and "poetic" words) are garments for the mind, to be tried on, with favorites chosen--but who wears the same thing every day? But in the way that clothing, though it hides, reveals the wearer, this book manages, in its anti-revelations, to create relevatory spaces in these poems. And when this occurs--frequently--in this book, the results are breathtaking.

The Sense Record is incredible, in the literal use of that word. It stretched the credulity of poetic form itself in order to arrive at the most unexpected emotional resonances. A signal book of poetry for the first decade of the 21st century.

Sappy but aware of the complications of sap, Moxley has Moxy.