New Time (Wesleyan Poetry Series) [Hardcover]

Leslie Scalapino (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 3, 1999 | Series: Wesleyan Poetry Series

The latest collection of poetry from one of the foremost American avant-garde poets.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Scalapino has proven to be one of experimental poetrys most successful genre-crossers, reducing narrative to its component agents and verbs and fusing them with epistemological investigations. Her disjunctive flow of phrasal units is a familiar post-modern strategem for replicating the minds mad race with time, but her inimitable staccato remains one of language poetrys signature achievements: landscape, delicateas sensory deprivationmilitary boyswearing training spurs of bottle capsgas stations, differentiatedcattle being. More diffuse than the brilliantly focused Way (1988), and a turn from recent prose-based works like Defoe, Scalapinos latest collection is conceived in stanza-like movements, and deliberately keeps narrative momentum in check, preoccupied with the contradictions between our inner and our outer lives: sleep-deprived one/ pressure so that the mind comes into the social unitonly/ the flowering trees, that have nothing but swimming on sky. Fragmentary perceptionsa river in Kyoto, the brown night, taxies, black silk irisesground aphoristic units of text that display influences from Emily Dickinson and Gertrude Stein to Wittgenstein. From page to page, phrases like the mind collapsing get recontextualized (the mind collapsing not on the surface; is the mind collapsing on its surface, its own space?) in a manner that many will find opens out into delicate meaning, but others will find frustrating. What emerges is an anxious paranoia over the selfs place in an exhausted body on the one hand, and a disintegrating social unit the othera vision that is not without a tentative hope.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From Kirkus Reviews

paper 0-8195-6356-0 Abstract verse revolving around the inner thoughts and intimations of a poet and novelist (Defoe, 1994, not reviewed) whose faith in the avant-garde appears fully intact. Experimental verse has become so old-hat that the term can hardly be used with a straight face any longer, but Scalapino brings a certain fresh innocence to her efforts thats at once touching and brave. Dispensing almost entirely with narrative, she uses images quite sparingly and relies upon highly recondite interior perceptions (if the nature of this is struggling wall of birds flying that (arent) on their own. if were not going to do this with people there isnt any existence) to animate her work, which in its essence is about as coherentand as hauntingas a febrile dream. Although the authors recollections of Japan and her daily routines in Berkeley feed her pronouncements (being in tradition is not being a corpse / (here), Kyoto with the river running through it), this is not an account of any particular placeor an account at all, for that matter. As the poet observes early on, The writing is not narrative telling the story or stories of events. Rather it is movements, a movement that was a real event where all is fictional as phenomena. So history is scrutinized by phenomena, observed as minute, particularand thus fictive as haphazard moving. Haphazard, certainly, and frustrating as well (in its apparent lack of focus), Scalapinos work is not without its rewards of austere grace and harsh clarity. But these dont come without hard effort on the readers part. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 100 pages
• Publisher: Wesleyan (May 3, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0819563552
• ISBN-13: 978-0819563552
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,536,200 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Delicate Bulldozer Lyrics, August 26, 2000

By 

Robert Zmuda (Pittsburgh, PA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: New Time (Wesleyan Poetry Series) (Paperback)

This book is hard to read, but there are intense moments of absolute pure Poetry. Is Leslie Scalapino a genius? Does she know what she is doing? If this book is so hard to read, why have I read it at least ten times already? With what insights am I rewarded for fighting my way through the jungle of what it takes to arrive at the moments of bliss?

This book is sort of like John Ashbery's (now famous) 1962 THE TENNIS COURT OATH, and her writing reminds me most of Gertrude Stein's STANZAS FOR MEDITATION. except Scalapino's NEW TIME is more fragmented or disjointed, but also far more lyrical, and far more stunning (and simple) in its revelations.

This book will not go away, and hopefully Scalapino will continue to forge ahead into new, unplowed terrain, sharing with her fans the layers of the pitch-black strata of her genius wherein sparkling diamonds can be unearthed, but only with a lot of work and patience.

2 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Like seeing Kyoto on valium, but more fractured than that., May 17, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: New Time (Wesleyan Poetry Series) (Hardcover)

"This is despair" is one of the recurring fragments in New Time, and "being depressed is enhanced-- by the rim?" is another. Some find this book full of sublime poetry, but this reader found it full of elegant, smug, and fragmentary babble; the effect is like one of seeing Kyoto on valium, but the impact is more fractured and disturbing than that. I urge this poet to work out more, to see more, to connect to other people and the world beyond her own intense solipsism in love with its own twists and terms. The cold war of the US Scalapino hothouse is over, and despair and preciosity are not enough to engage this fallen fallen world. Go back to Go on this book, or listen to Basho or Dionne Warwick for some beauty that knows more than its own same-old language gaming. "New Time" is not new, just repetition of the same strategies times 94 pages.