Soul Data |
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Author:
| Svenvold, Mark |
Series title: | Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry Ser. |
ISBN: | 978-1-57441-046-4 |
Publication Date: | Mar 1998 |
Publisher: | University of North Texas Press
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Book Format: | Paperback |
List Price: | USD $12.95 |
Book Description:
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"Soul Data is rarely compounded--of wit and music, surface elegance and intellectual depth, quirk and quandary. Its sensual intelligence is on high alert, and the sheer unsheerness of its language--all its densities and textures--is a linguiphiliacal delight. Unmistakeably American (the poetry's occasions and its cadences alike serve for signature) it has the jinx-meister's humors about it. There's a dark streak, too, an eye for the natural indifferences that border the...
More Description
"Soul Data is rarely compounded--of wit and music, surface elegance and intellectual depth, quirk and quandary. Its sensual intelligence is on high alert, and the sheer unsheerness of its language--all its densities and textures--is a linguiphiliacal delight. Unmistakeably American (the poetry's occasions and its cadences alike serve for signature) it has the jinx-meister's humors about it. There's a dark streak, too, an eye for the natural indifferences that border the spotlit human heats. A fine rhetorical savvy, in a mind inclined to the chillier depths: among poetic gifts these days it's an uncommon conjunction, a gift of mysteries, like the sight (across a night pond's surface) of bright-blue shooting star: one hopes the other humans get to see it."--Heather McHugh
V [Linoleum]
South of Spokane Street, a gear works
turns its teeth--shadows in a cavern,
through the cycles of a drop-forge piston,
heft themselves and recoil in a dark
rain of sparks, the echo off the blocks--
pa-tang!--arriving late, repeats itself again,
a ceaseless, a remorseless hammering home,
a point made and lost in the patterns of work.
Across the street, a hunkered stretch of houses,
swing sets and cyclone fencing, a clatch of cars.
The agent shrugs--"It's zoned Residential/
Light Industrial"--pa-tong! A lunatic fringe
of gladiolus fronts the walkways and the rows
of empty rooms we roll by at low idle.