parallel equators
Recent Work Press, $19.95 pb, 186 pp
Strange communion
‘Poems reawaken in us,’ writes James Longenbach, ‘the pleasure of the unintelligibility of the world.’ They do so via ‘mechanisms of self-resistance’: disjunctive strategies that work, for Longenbach, to ‘resist our intelligence almost successfully’. What ‘almost’ means here is, of course, a matter of taste – and style. Nonetheless, this Romantic mandate – that poems achieve clarity by integrating opacity – invites a question fundamental to poetics: how much resistance is too much, or not enough?
‘welcome the dark angle that cannot be measured’: this exhortation early in Nathan Shepherdson’s collection betrays an interest in absence and negativity, as well as an aversion to literal sense that another poem calls ‘a terror attack / on the noun’. Tellingly, a line in the next poem asserts that ‘angles are never alone until they’re measured’. In a book addressed to Shepherdson’s recently deceased father and abounding in dedications to others both living and dead, poetry becomes an open field that undermines language’s differentiating – and isolating – impulse, and such openness entails a drawing together, a strange communion.
Continue reading for only $10 per month. Subscribe and gain full access to Australian Book Review. Already a subscriber? Sign in. If you need assistance, feel free to contact us.
Comment (1)
Leave a comment
If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.
If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.
Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.