Synopsis
Without reference of horizon farther makes navigation by usual instruments, and heroes, impossible. We recognize the image on its cover as sea; we recognize its language as English. Recognition ends there. We are in a funnel descent — a downward circular motion that washes section titles from one another until only the letter O remains. Words also turn into and fall from each other: always compass / encompassing passing / collapsing / as if beauty were complete / not. We fall into the sea of Thackrey’ s sleight of ear — a straight line of words becomes a spiral, a whole book a circling back. We enter the letter O — lens opening, contraction — the slip space between letters, words, lines, the said, the implied echo. This is how she turns us through the open portal of order’ s disorder, a history that begins with sundering and ends with shattering — This is how she collapses the compass so that known coordinates disappear, making possible this paean to as if beauty that is infinitely farther.
About the Author
Susan Thackrey, a poet who lives and works in San Francisco, began to compose poetry at the age of three. She was an inaugurating student in the Poetics Program at New College in San Francisco in 1980, and studied with Robert Duncan and Diane di Prima formally and informally over a number of years. Thackrey has given invitational lectures on Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, and George Oppen, including as a keynote speaker at the George Oppen Conference in Buffalo, and more recently on Duncan’ s The H.D. Book for the San Francisco Poetry Center. Since reading Homer over a five year period with Duncan and some of her poet contemporaries, an important and lively part of her life in poetry has almost always included variously focused and longlived reading groups with other poets. Her day jobs have included cofounding and managing the art gallery Thackrey and Robertson in San Francisco, as well as her current work as a Jungian analyst in the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. There she has taught, spoken, and published, focusing especially on art, including publishing a talk and essay on Jung’ s paintings for The Red Book: Reflections on C.G. Jung’ s Liber Novus (Routledge). Her poems have appeared in a number of journals, including Five Fingers, Hambone, Talisman, Traverse, and Volt. Current books in print, in addition to Farther, are Empty Gate (Listening Chamber), George Oppen: A Radical Practice (O Books and The San Francisco Poetry Center), and Andalusia (Chax).
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