http://shawjonathan.wordpress.com/2011/09/21/joanne-burnss-amphora/

You often hear people complaining that ‘most modern poetry’ is deliberately obscure, doesn’t use rhyme or rhythm, and is generally not reader-friendly. They might have Joanne Burns in mind: apart from infrequent commas and an occasional dash or semicolon she mostly eschews punctuation, she rarely writes metric verse (presumably what the questioner meant by ‘rhythm’), she uses big words, makes frequent reference to other poets and (in this book at least) religious arcana, and she often wanders down trails of seemingly random association. But, you know, spend a bit of time with her poems and chances are you’ll come away feeling oddly refreshed.

For example, the third of amphora‘s seven sections, entitled ‘streamers', is described in a subheading as a series of koannes. I imagine everyone knows what a koan is – or at least, like me, knows that ‘What is the sound of one hand clapping?’ is one. I went to Google to check my initial assumption that ‘koanne’ was an alternative spelling. Apparently not. Then I realised that the word was a playful invention, combining the poet’s first name with the zen challenge to the rational mind: so the reader is given fair warning to expect some kind of idiosyncratic almost-sense, not to struggle to make sense, but to let the non-sense play around in one’s brain. Some of them work brilliantly:

you miss the bus
before it arrives how easy
to change the lightbulb

(Incidentally, the lack of punctuation here doesn’t really cause difficulty; it just slows the reading down.)

I found the whole book engaging, but it was the second section, ‘soft hoods of saints’, that spoke to me: a Catholic child’s perspective on stories of the saints nostalgically recalled, overlaid with adult erudition, mashed up with high and low cultural references and approached with a wry, mostly affectionate, probing intelligence. It's fun, but something serious is happening as well.… (más)

Denunciada

shawjonathan | Sep 21, 2011 |

An illustrated history of dairies por Joanne Burns

I read a number of the these poems with bemused incomprehension. However, inspired by Jeanette Winterson's practice of memorising a poem a week, I decided to memorise two from this collection, and they richly repaid the effort. For the record, I can recite number xii of 'diversions' (beginning 'The wall longs to be rubble') and her lovely elegaic 'ecce'.

Denunciada

shawjonathan | Jun 25, 2008 |

Ver Más Reseñas