Nomina (American Poets Continuum)
In her previous collection,Spar(2002), Volkman stripped away the formal conventions of lineated verse (as well as overtly stated subject matter) to explore what a poem could say in prose, using rhythm, sound and tone as her principal tools of meaning-making. In this third collection, a sequence of 50 untitled, rhymed sonnets, she takes her interrogation of the poem as formal machine a step further, using English poetry's most famous form as her guide. Like her prose poems, these sonnets are concerned with love and some notion of a higher, or other, power, or at least with the capacity of language to bridge the gap between addressor and addressee, seeking a nascent book/ in which the wind has written. Channeling Emily Dickinson, the poems are at once fierce, ravished, perplexed and perplexing (Iffinalfell/.../ would time annul the zero in the laws?), gesturing toward sense, never quite making it, yet mysteriously giving and withholding enough to keep the reader in their thrall.(Apr.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.