Customer Reviews

Uttermost Paradise Place (APR Honickman 1st Book Prize)

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Uttermost Paradise Place, like all good language poetry, makes use of every word on every line in order to extract the reader's mental quickness and inner ear. Short poems, long poems, alike will make you reconsider where the poem started and where it left you at the end - always aware that every "motion" is an interior one, an abstracted conclusion, a surrealistic surprise.

The closest prose analogies I can come to are the construction of Virginia Woolf's sentences, which surprised her peers and modern-day writers with the ability to hang so much mental motion on lengthy gramattical structures, and oddly enough Terry Prachett's L-space, where words take on more heft and warp the nature of the universe. Each word in a McKee poem insists on its own existence, and when it locks into the whole of the line, creates a different perceptual slice of what we think is going on.

For example, take "The Last Wall is a Strange Cool Puzzle" where she writes:

"...Sherlock, hold the vial/ thought up to the light, not the social shattering easy sound/next door and then laughter,not fingerprints or happiness but love/ of love, absence, inscrutable center of a stone..."

We begin thinking of a physical wall,and she tells us about the mason. But by the time you read the lines above, your idea of what the wall is - and where the love of love contains, is or is going - continues to shift. Interestingly, hell as a concept or a place of redemption is a continuous subtext of this book, belied by its (euphemistic?) title that implies the complete opposite.

If you like language, puzzles, nuances, metaphoric shifts, and perception madly walking, then you will like Uttermost Paradise Place.

McKee's poems are like a madcap scene. Sometimes she tricks out the comedy of one. But she's not so much concerned with farce as the knowledge of the tentativeness and autonomy of things and situations and of one being thrown off kilter by this. "The surfaces are wrong," the poet tells the reader in the opening of "Sun On One." In most of the poems though McKee goes beyond such simple declarations to show the reader how wrong." In "Death of a Blue Vase," "The little lead soldiers from a former time creep up to the window/in ranks and report: it was the blinding sun-/light, clouds too racing past./Once the ladder was secured upright to the bed/the truck sped north to a superfluous question/interrupts a magic truck." Time and different levels or dimensions (suggested by "ladder"), incongruence, and the artifice of magic all come together." Even Heaven itself is a madcap scene: "Paradise is on the floor above us...we can hear the participants/moving furniture around...It sounds like no one is in charge./Chairs gouging the floor. Collisions. Very little coordination/in general... (from Glacier 4).

This is not surrealism because it is not meant to--nor does it in fact--represent the illogic or meanings of dreams or the subconscious. McKee craftily deals with the situation known as existence.