Spar
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- $24.99
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
Karen Volkman’s award-winning collection Spar has as its central form a highly compressed, musical variant of the prose poem. Volkman develops a new lyric density that marries the immediacy of image-centered poetry to the rhythmic resources of prose. Her first poem begins, “Someone was searching for a Form of Fire,” and this wild urge to seek form—and thus definition—in the most uncontainable of elements propels the book forward; each poem maps the mind’s evolving positions in response to its variable and perilous encounters. Sometimes the encounter is romantic or purely carnal, a sensual landscape of human relations. At other times, nature itself has an almost humanly emotional connection to the speaker. While very much a living voice, the poems’ speaker is not a consistent self but a mutable figure buffeted by tenderness, terror, irony, or lust into elaborate evasions, exclamations, verbal hijinks, and lyric flights. As its title suggests, Spar embodies both resistance and aspiration, while its epigraphs further emphasize the simultaneous allure and danger of the unknown within the sensual and material worlds and in the mind itself.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"This must be some specious season, quick and numbered, pulling the this-world to quivered, hectic ends. Sepals could count it. Pistils, pearly queens. Little godhead stamens, tense, erected. All this intends," writes Volkman with the mischievous authority of a sideshow barker standing before the curtains of reality, ushering the reader into a slipstream of cosmic, sensually redolent speculation. Alliteration and near-hypertrophied wordplay abound (one poem even declares "The day un-days"), and Volkman convincingly melds her engagement with the ludic quality of words with the marvelously chaotic commerce of the natural world. Unnatural pairings of nouns, verbs or adjectives ("tremor and debit," "blur and spend," "numb, recumbent dust") often combine with a conclusive, if inscrutable, declaration of being, as when a poem ends, "I am more than carbon or echo: I am fame," and another (on the facing page), "If words are wire and can whip him, this isthe scar." The pronounced artificiality of Volkman's idiom thwarts any easy emotional identification with her subjects; this literariness, which edges into irony ("O coronet your silver purpose stunts the weeds, the thrashy frays. I won't stall the morning to please you..."), produces an inescapable sense of remove. Volkman's speaker often adopts the pose of one who has worked through the riddles of existence as an English colonial might have worked through an Indian market, muscling through to get a better view of the multicolored objects and evocative scripts, which finally can't signify. Still, these poems are involved, elusive and often startling performances.
