Synopsis
Poetry. In VICINITIES, her follow-up to HOW MANY MORE OF THEM ARE YOU? (Avec Books 1999, winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award), Lisa Lubasch illuminates a myriad of landscapes and narratives Jo"Lisa Lubasch's writing is animated by an intense longing, not a longing for wholeness or the self, not even necessarily for coherence, which she knows to be an insidious palliative. No, Lubasch's longing is deeper than any balm the world's surfaces can provide. As for precedents, one might think Holderlin and Artaud, Sappho and Joyce Mansour. But let me be clear: In the age of originality there is no one writing like Lisa Lubasch"--John Yau.
Reviews
Lubasch's second book comes hot on the heels of her award-winning premier volume, How Many More of Them Are You? (2001), which pointed toward the essay form as a kind of stylistic metaphor, arranging with in it a series of charged, one-line zingers that delve into the bottomless irony of philosophizing from, by and toward the self. Vicinities, by contrast, is a collection of lyrics that seem pitched toward finding a way out of the abyss. "Memories of Impermanence," a sort of spiritual diary in leap-frogging meter, is reminiscent of Jorie Graham's elliptical writing or, further back, Robert Duncan in high projective-verse mode: "We were trying/ to see into./ Air, even at this pace,/ moves into other/ speeds./ In her / seeing/ hastened away/ from, as if/ filling out a distance,/ budding into/ likeness,/ which, conceivably,/ could miss everything." While Lubasch's dramatizations of soul searching include her trademark rhetorically-overcharged apostrophes, here the speakers encounters with "evil," the past, pain, and one's ontological bounds are forebodingly (and self-consciously) submissive: "One must relinquish all ideas of guardianship,/ divorce oneself from seeing, prostrate oneself before darkness/ A long and quiet flight from the stir of dawn." Lubasch's touch with a shorter line is energetic and careful, and there is something quaintly retrograde in poems like "When I Walk," which recalls some of the play of abstractions of early Creeley. "The Harboring of Ends" suggests a deeper, religious nature, while "A Question Stood Before Her Like a Terrible Eye" is daringly spare and works the way painter Cy Twombly's scrawls energize a canvas. If it all doesn't come together with the searing, anti-vatic force of How Many, this book shows Lubasch working her way out of that book's almost-overwhelming influences (mostly 19th-century French), and toward something new and genuine. (Oct.)
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
