Soul Data (Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry) - Softcover

Svenvold, Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1574410466 ISBN 13: 9781574410464

Publisher: University of North Texas Press, 1998

Synopsis

"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.

About this title

About the Author

Mark Svenvold, winner of The Nation “Discovery” Award, received his MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His poems have appeared in a variety of magazines including AGNI, The Atlantic Monthly, The Gettysburg Review, The Nation, Ploughshares, The Virginia Quarterly Review and have been anthologized in Under 35: The New Generation of American Poets. He lives in New York City.

Reviews

Loads of sonnets and villanelles make up this first volume, the winner of an award honoring the late Vassar Miller, who shares nothing in common with Svenvolds irregularly rhymed verse. Not an object or language poet per se, Svenvold often sacrifices sense to sound, though its not clear if his obscurities are deliberate. A long sonnet sequence, Death of the Cabaret Hegel, celebrates a Seattle performance space in an old factory situated at the continents edge, where everything is all echo and rain. Eventually demolished for a freeway, the scene it leaves behind boasts the glories of mixed zoning and thrift-shop hunting. Three later poems fail to capture the tone or textures of their subject, Thelonious Monk (who supposedly taught us a lesson in liberty); Svenvold seems more at home with the 60s nihilism of the Doors (Variation on Themes by The Doors). The poet establishes his working-class bona fides in poems about a garage during the day (Work) and during the Graveyard Shift. Svenvolds sense of irony fails to illumine poems about his parents dying, even though theyre buried near Jimi Hendrix. Such found facts and a tendency to burst into pseudo-profundity (you cannot connect) suggest artistic immaturity, though there are glimmers of talent here, too. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of North Texas Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1574410466
• ISBN 13: 9781574410464
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 59