Gap Gardening: Selected Poems
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- £8.49
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- £8.49
Publisher Description
An essential edition of a major avant-garde poet: “Waldrop compels us to seek out new superlatives” (Ben Lerner, Jacket)
Rosmarie Waldrop says Gap Gardening “spans forty years of exploring the language I breathe and move in and that continues to condition me even while I try to contribute to it. It tracks my turn from verse to prose poems, to focusing on the sentence and its boundaries, my increasing reliance on collage and source texts as a way of engaging with other voices, of being in dialogue.”
Gap Gardening also traces Waldrop’s growing sense of writing as an exploration of what happens in between. Between words, sentences, people, cultures. Between fragment and flow, thinking and feeling, mind and body. For the first time, we have a complete and clear view of the work of a great and inquiring, brave and indispensable poet.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Arriving nearly 20 years after Waldrop released her first volume of selected poems, Another Language, this new book tracks her scintillating mind through four decades of aesthetic and intellectual development. From the spare, quick-breathed, and short-lined poems of her early years through a progression into prose poems the form that dominates here readers will find ongoing, assiduous explorations of fundamental questions about embodiment, perception, and memory. Waldrop is sublimely attuned to the relational as she charts space, grammar, colonial power, and the erotic, all of which figure importantly. A hallmark of her work is that its subject matter is held ever askew; one feels "always on the verge/ or seeing it/ there/ on the edge/ of the horizon." As the title suggests, Waldrop attends especially to lacunae, the never-quite-bridgeable spaces between words, people, language, and experience. She makes that absence a guiding principle of her poetics. "The four points of the compass are equal on the lawn of the excluded middle," she writes, "the empty space at the center of each poem to allow penetration." Some poems make use of collage and erasure, and all create tension between continuity and disjuncture, sound and silence. Taken together, they stand testament to a career of innovation and affirm Waldrop's essential contributions to 20th- and 21st-century literature.
