Customer Reviews

Swirl

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Susan McCabe's "Swirl" is perfectly titled: each poem sends us into a powerful swirl of words and images. She be can disarming, too honest, with accusations spat out as in the beginning of "When the Shore Moved": "You're bumping anyway./ Facing out is about trying to./ Bandages worn without./ There's nothing more to spill is there." Notice she does not end this last sentence in a question mark though you would expect one. It is as if McCabe has no qualms about answering her queries all within one phrase. And her couplets! Listen: "The unswum pool lies still,/ olive cat sipping its reflection." And this: "By the time we stumbled out,/ the moon had lost its pompadour." McCabe is a remarkable poetic voice whose words dance, confuse and infuse. This is a beautiful, slender book.

THis volume is a must for anyone interested in lyric poetry--as it becomes more hybrid in the 21st century. The language radiates loss and longing (even the historical poem about the Hotel Adlon, shut down by Hitler), but each poem is a new form, an inventive syntax, and break into original explorations of being, gender, identity; these poems are acts of intense perception, both interior and exterior, especially how the two often overlap, mingle, coalesce---vibrate with playful, sad, and precise understanding: "Milk has limits," one poem declares, while others are out scouting and trespassing limits as with the Steinian "There is a Dislocation." "Cezanne's Doubt" is a portrait of the exacting artist, always moving towards his "ideal" and always feeling his/her limits, shaping a life that is itself an art" "It will take decades to get it right." There are also some great elegies here: "Towards Elegy," a long meditation on mother-loss; and "Sweet William," apparently a meditation on father-loss. "Isis" begins the book with its self-naming: "I am the bride of bits and pieces." Perhaps this best describes the love affair with the incomplete yet pressing demands of the unconscious and its convoluting processes. See also this poet's second book, starkly different, still dazzling: Descartes' Nightmare, winner of Agha Shahid Ali prize in 2008.