Black Series
Poems
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
In her remarkable Black Series, Laurie Sheck turns the ordinary world inside out and shows us its glittering seams. Her long, elegantly quizzical lines convey a haunted vision of human striving which is in part an elaboration on our daily reality, and in part a fantastic departure from it. “I can almost taste the glassy air,” she writes. “Where are the birds in it, / wings lifting as currents buffet them like echoes, bright / chaos of atomized instances . . . ?” Roaming freely in the shifting landscape of the imagination, Sheck delivers an inner life that is just as vivid as what we see around us; at the same time, she shows us what we see in a new light, bringing illumination even to darkness:
It’s the black night that wakes in me,
so dominant, so focused.
And then a car goes by and I think,
“I’m in the world,”
tires kicking up gravel from the dust.
What does the orange hawkweed do
inside this dark–its radiance
secretive but not extinguished?
To read this collection is to discover at every turn that secretive but undeniable radiance, and a language that is both riveting and distinctive.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
From the "irradiated mirrors" and "smooth unstartled mannequins" of its long title sequence to an impressive poem about art historians' radiography, Sheck's fourth collection presents intricate verbal surfaces, with pointers to elaborate philosophical depths. Unfortunately the surfaces, and the depths, most often seem borrowed from another contemporary poet, Jorie Graham. "How silent the unbecoming is, how silent the unraveling," Sheck writes in her title sequence, in phrases sure to recall Graham's The End of Beauty. Other poems seem to pick up, or try to rewrite, Graham's best-known single poems (one about Pascal's coat, another about Orpheus and Eurydice, another about a subway). Her influence shows in dramatic description of light and shadow ("bright/ chaos of atomized instances"), in rhetorical questions and portmanteau words ("What inside me will finance the trepass, the unprisoning?"), in her fleets of abstract nouns ("Immobilism leaned down tall in her black dress"), in allusions to the language of film, even in titles borrowed from Tudor poetry: matching Graham's "Of Forced Sights and Trusty Ferefulness," Sheck has "To Tell Him Tydings How the Wind Was Went." Sheck (The Willow Grove) is hardly the only poet to mimic Graham's influential manner her sawtooth-shaped stanzas, her Pascalian wagers, her rapt stutters and showstopping queries. "Doubt is a beautiful garment," Sheck declares, "if only I could wear it,/ all silk and ashes, on my skin." Her new verse shows undoubted ambition and charm; it may also give many readers the feeling that she's wearing someone else's clothes.
