Poems from Agenda, Critical Quarterly, The Rialto, etc. 44 pages.
Words obscure meaning. Shared unsaid understandings. Silence violated -
- "words that flesh themselves/ when the mind untethered/ from its own unending chatter/ dares to leave itself alone "(p.11)
- "Monasteries perched/ on pinnacles of quiet" (p.14)
- "the bearded monks/ are at prayer,/ threading their minds/ into spheres where/ sight, speech and thought/ are broken rungs/ on a ladder of love" (p.14)
- "the house was hoarding silence" (p.20)
- "Was it here my love began to fatten/ in its solitude, and ripen into words?" (p.31)
- "mine was a love/ that made an instrument of absence" (p.31)
- "as nuns wrap walls around themselves/ to dull the chattering world,/ you cultivated silence to hear the words" (p.32)
- "On Christmas Eve he scoured the silences" (p.38)
- "Strange to find silence itself so noisy with sound" (p.51)
- "Silence made loud with internable discourse./ Nowhere to escape the trivial self-chattering" (p.51)
Chains of abstract nouns
- "Days to give uneasy stirrings time to brink,/ as when a pool quietens,/ reveals those things one would forget" (p.21)
- "But sound of protest growing steadily/ cut through our lethargy, we saw/ how fragile was our tenancy of peace" (p.23)
- "this bird-chewed crocus/ that carries hope/ beyond the scope/ of its small statement// so insignificant/ that one might miss/ its place upon the path/ of winter turning into spring" (p.25)
I think she tries to keep all the line-length within a poem roughly equal, which causes strange line-breaks. The stanza breaks are more natural, less regular, like paragraph breaks in prose. Many of the lines are iambic.
The language is rather one-paced and single-toned. In "a trap-door opened/ one autumn night/ throwing down/ long ladders of light/ for the mind to soar/ through a leap of stars/ to a blazing carnival/ night of fire" we have soaring minds, and also "ladders of light", "leap of stars" and "night of fire".
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