The Violence (New Series, 11) - Softcover

Paquin, Ethan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0916272850 ISBN 13: 9780916272852

Publisher: Ahsahta Press, 2005

Synopsis

Poetry. Ethan Paquin's third book is a sprawling meditation touching on the loss of love and commitment, the painfulness of memory, and the disorientation as well as the consolations of travel. The poems of THE VIOLENCE contain a rawness of emotion and clarity of feeling rare among writers of Paquin's generation. Where form plays a part, it is likely to be exploded: the poet's page becomes more of a canvas than a neutral vehicle. "THE VIOLENCE is a compact of determining forces both poet and language must survive, whether they be fact of a day's events or else lodged in the very fabric of language itself. It is Ethan Paquin's power that he can admit these furies and survive them"--Robert Creeley.

About this title

Reviews

With its mystical fragments, bluntly sexual invocations, and cryptic stanzas halfway between memories and magic spells, Paquin searches in this third collection for "someone please to tell time for the beneath"; he goes on to imagine the hidden forces "beneath" ordinary lives, among them death, lust and visions of eternity. Some pages are agrammatical, collage-like imprecations; others resemble prayers. Much of the work includes exclamations, some of them passionate, others comically random: "Come on in, cathedral!/ I won't harm you!" "I like being palatalized by rain!" Such visceral emphases sometimes bring to mind the spell-casting poetry of Robert Duncan, at other times a scrambled postmodern Dylan Thomas. Paquin (Accumulus) also uses the page as a canvas, turning the book sideways, leaving blank lines in place of key nouns, or otherwise making layout do expressive work: these interests recall Paquin's interest in design and form as editor of the on-line journal Slope. But he attends productively to far-flung natural landscapes, among them a Southwestern arroyo; most of the time, though, he focuses on the blood, sex, hopes and doubts he views as human universals. (Sept.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Ahsahta Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0916272850
• ISBN 13: 9780916272852
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 80