Playful, linguistically nuanced and jaggedly jazzed, the poems of Bellen's third collection come at an old philosophical problem with the very latest aesthetic tools. The various series of lyrical fragments and abstracted aphorisms here are pitched toward the capital "O" "Order" of the title, in the sense of wanting to gently blow down teleology's house of cards. As Bellen's speaker puts it in "Cuccina": "The most beautiful order is still/ A random collection/ of things insignificant in themselves." Bellen (Tales of Murasaki) revels in Stevensian riddles and red-herrings ("If every butterfly were smoke, would all perception/ Fall to smell? If every wing were paper-white, would// All perception end in sight?") and doggerel-based silliness: "Please, oh please, spread something sweet/ Over my shredded wheat// That rests upon this yellow plate,/ fired in the biscuit state." The latter mode works toward irony in some poems ("Perennials"), while falling flat in others ("For the Saturday Evenings Girls' Pottery Club"). Yet the more serious pieces contain zen-like assertions: "God rests in the odd/ Clamor." The Joyce lift ("God is a shout in the street") and pun on "odd" are just two of this line's trajectories, distracting enough to make readers forget the problem at hand.
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Product Description
In her third collection of poems Bellen reexamines mythologies and religions - Greek and popular western myths; Buddhism, Hinduism, and Judaism- and finds in their rituals and practices a model for artists as they attempt to organize the expansiveness of the human spirit. Whether exploiting the aphoristic fragments of Herakleitos or recounting the story of American pioneer Calamity Jane, Bellen's poems rekindle the wild spirit which drives the making of human expression. Bellen's most recent book of poems Tales of Murasaki & Other Poems won the 1999 National Poetry Series Award.
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