Trace Elements

Acclaimed for her ability to weave religion, nature, language, and art into poetry, the author of Channel shares her second set of work that explores how we know what we know and how we order knowledge, both as individuals and as a collective. Original.

A previous winner of the Barnard Prize, and currently an English prof (the University of Rochester), Jordan offers a second volume (after Channel, 1990) thats serious and somber and relies on an intellectually compelling dialectic of the abstract and the natural. Jordans unsettling metaphysics leads to abrupt line shifts and edgy phrases: Her poems begin with debristhe trace elements of the titleand end wondering what the difference is between trash and keepsake. The known, referential world is simply a hall of exits (Dinosaur Calendar); and Roman ruins, the shells in Goethes house, animal remainsall yield no meaning, just an indifference of things. Many of the weary poems here record the world after the Fall, the loss of faith and certainty; and imagine a prelapsarian idyll before knowledge and perspective differentiated objects with names (Anchorites). Poems such as The Cult of Solitude and Spectrum announce Jordan's loneliness and escape from the world, her admiration for a contemplative life in which silence widens into exile. Keeping vigil with discontent, Jordan pierces the veil of debris (O) in poems that are always smart, and sometimes prophetic. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

"Ammonites," the long, satisfying poem that concludes Jordan's second collection, traces the relationship between memorabilia and art, between relics of life and life itself. An ammonite is a type of coiled fossil, recalling, for this poet, Goethe's house, near which she bought one from a woman who was selling them on the street, and also recalling a chapel in which Latin prayers are lettered in human bone. And if the fossil's name also brings to mind the name of well-known poet A.R. Ammons, who like Jordan resides in upstate New York and is drawn into natural forms as territory for the mind's wanderings, perhaps it is no accident: "Elemental/mixtures of form: the narcissi, the snow,/ my fingers with their unprecedented whorls?variations/ in the matter." Although Jordan's artistic strategy is to humanize the world by weaving a web of connections, she is not deceived into a grandiose vision: "there are no symbols in the world, only things/ we tend." And while there are no fireworks in these quiet, mindful poems, there is much that is human and deeply considered. Jordan's first book, Channel (Beacon, 1990), was a winner of the "Barnard New Poets" series. Recommended for most poetry collections.?Ellen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Lib., New York
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.