David Wagoner Reviewing George O'Connell's Poetry
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- Diana Shi & George O'Connell 发表于:
In his review of George O’Connell’s collection "The Force of Ice" for the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, the prominent U.S. poet David Wagoner said:
“In The Force of Ice the poet finds many human moods and emotions embodied in landscapes, some like old photos where many small dramas are played out for the reader. These are stronger than simple nostalgia. They are complicated by implied pain and love. Many are elegiac, yet remain tough-minded.
The poet has a strong lyric sensibility, and his many selves observe their surroundings with restraint, with subtle, unobtrusive language, and his personae remain unusually modest. The emphasis is on the visual, not the discursive. He sees an icicle—’Dawn coming up past the treeline/ and hanging under eaves/ this spike of brightness,/ its ribbed, coarse sides/ the icy flux of winter/ wheedled to its finest spine’—and transforms it for our mind’s eyes and ears. He gives us a series of evocative examinations of crucial moments in his early life, insightful lyrics like ‘Transubstantiation’ and ‘The Lawns of River Forest’ which help us understand the views and motives of the mature observer.
In a significant epigraph, he quotes from Jean Follain’s A World Rich in Anniversaries: ‘Behind each thing a password lies hidden.’ Here those passwords take on a Hardy-like tension, where what is lost is rediscovered and held firm as by the ice of the title.”
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最后更新 2012-07-07 08:38:05