Chase McCord McCord itibaren Puiesti itibaren Puiesti

I loved this collection. Poetry can be a cherry-picking reading hobby, but Armantrout’s voice in Up to Speed is so consistent and sure that even the most far-flung scribble would feel essential to the compilation. The poems are sometimes dreamy and directionless, but each word is barbed with insight. She spreads words like bridge planks over a philosophical abyss, using only as many as necessary, teasing us with glimpses of both the nothingness and infinity traversed by language. Armountrout’s style is fresh and effectively surreal. She is a master of economy, conjuring nuanced emotion and observational depth with very few words. Instead of more traditional commas and periods, she relies on the quotation mark and the parentheses to create layers, rather than barriers or suggestions of pace. Taken with the ambiguity and the sparseness of the language, the precision and beauty of her poetry is mysteriously hard to account for, as if she were sewing intricate lace with a broken loom. Her strengths allow her to really shine in a single line when she wants to. It feels wrong to use these scraps out of context but a few of my favorites are: "a thought is a wish for relation doubling as a boundary," "the opposite of nothingness is direction," "in order to write you must fall in love with your own thought every time." Armantrout sets her sights on the basics, but she draws from a palette that is more philosophical than poetic: time, space, movement, relations between concepts, self-consciousness. She explores these subjects with such quiet confidence and wit that they somehow seem more illuminated in her compact poems than in any ancient Greek text. Relationships between things are treated with a playful and ingenious discernment, and gracefully recorded. At her very best, Armantrout proves that a crisp metaphor and a handful of very exact sentences is more effective than pages of erudition or a well-crafted essay. "light finds the quickest route and the mind tries to see patterns. what do these things have in common? they behave as if impatient." Like a magician she summons up images with a flick of the wrist, and saws our beautiful trusted things in half, smiling, showing us that all is an illusion. "i don't mind learning i'm in hell if i can learn it again and again."