Poet John Ashbery calls Carl Martin's exquisitely imagistic poems "the work one seizes on greedily at moments when one feels like drowning in poetry." This collection presents a pastiche of dream language and German poetic tradition that is so taut and razor-edged that it sings like an enchanted sword. From the influence of Novalis and his love affair with The Night to the free fall of Holderlein through language's abyss, Martin's images transcend the merely beautiful and plunge us into the sublime, a place where only minds such as Goethe's have successfully gone.
In "The Cult of Language," letters are transformed into objects and sounds, "pulsating nodules" that "wave from a mushroom surface" to finally become recognized as the changelings that they are, "chimeras at noon." In "Weimar Rococo," a troubled young Goethe's words reflect the world that exists at the corner of our glance, in the shadow of dark woods where the messenger "Mercury an angry spirit, stares at us." These poems are not for the faint of metaphor but for true lovers of language. --Susan Swartwout
Review
"Carl Martin reminds me of certain great 'outsider poets of the past like Gerard de Nerval or Robert Walserwriters whose work one seizes on greedily at moment when one feel like drowning in poetry. This is the right stuff." -- John Ashbery
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