Distant Mandate
Poems
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In Distant Mandate, Ange Mlinko moves between the tormented southern landscape, with its alternately arid and flooded scrublands, and the imaginative landscapes of Western art. Guided by her spiritual forbears—Orpheus, Mallarmé, Pound, Yeats, and others—Mlinko deftly places herself within the tradition of the poet in protest against the obduracy of the real.
Mlinko takes the title from a piece by Laszló Krasznahorkai on the unknowable origins of the Alhambra, the monument “for the sight of which there is only a distant mandate . . . [one] can see, in any event, the moment of creation of the world, of course all the while understanding nothing of it.” This distant mandate, also the “bitter ideal” of Mallarmé, is the foundation upon which all works of art are composed—the torment of eros and the intimation of war.
Myth is central to these poems; some are based on the story Cupid and Psyche, others serve as odes to Aphrodite or as explorations of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. In Distant Mandate, Mlinko has given us a shimmering and vibrant collection, one that shows us not only how literature imagines itself through life but also how life reimagines itself through literature.
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Mlinko (Marvelous Things Overheard) repurposes the archaic and deposits the mythic into a contemporary space, crafting glimmering poems of scrupulous linguistic intricacy that transcend time. In one she travels away from "the land/ of Dollar This, Save That, Thrift Buys" and ends in a new place, which she describes through a series of musical negations that include likening a shell to an ancient Greek skin scraper: "Seems like nothing's gentle here but mist:/ not spiky palms, sand spurs, the strigil/ of a shell that scrapes the rock to grist;/ not the lighthouse's gimlet vigil." Propelled by sound, Mlinko's end-rhyme patterns amplify her deft wordplay. These song-like structures are, for her, a small source of stability in an ever-changing world. She admits, "I guess we like our stanzas/ like barrier islands taking the hit/ when the Atlantic's/ all worked up in one of its blustery/ dances." Mlinko's "Repeated patterns tease" and further mark her preoccupation with stable geometries: "Ocean beyond the ramparts/ suggests that stem-celled seconds fiend-/ ishly agglomerate with fits and starts// into unprecedented forms." References to forts and fortresses ("the feminine form!") also dot the collection, whose title is derived from a L szl Krasznahorkai comment on the Alhambra in Spain. Seeking order within chaos, Mlinko layers delicately wrought lines into crystalline solids.
