A Protocol for Touch
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A Protocol for Touch
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Description
"Constance Merritt is a poet to defeat categories, to oppose 'the tyranny of names' with a poetry that sets its own terms of encounter, its 'protocols of touch'--tender and austere, formal and intimate at once. Hers is a voice with many musics, sufficiently rich, nuanced and various to express, maintain poise and wrest meaning from the powerful cross-currents in which the heart is torn. I have seldom seen intelligence equal to such a scorching degree of intensity, or mastery of form so equal to passion's contradictory occasions. Merritt's prosodic range is prodigious--she moves in poetic forms as naturally as a body moves in its skin, even as her lines ring with the cadenced authority of a gifted and schooled ear. Here, in her words, the iambic ground bass is in its vital questioning mode: "The heart's insistent undersong: how live?/how live? How live?" this poetry serves no lesser necesssity than to ask that."--Eleanor Wilner Between us, how we wrestle over words
Strain to wring some blessing from the silence,
Deliverance from violence, its fear, its lure,
The tyranny of names: night day,
Sable and alabaster, flint shale,
Steel and lace. Who among us can afford
To speak the language--any language--rightly?
As if it weren't enough to bear one heart
Eternally divided in its chambers?
We stand close enough to touch. We do
Not touch. Between us burns a sword of fire,
A rusted turnstile glinting in the sun.
Product details
- Type:
- Book
- Binding:
- Paperback
- Languages:
-
Original:
English
- Number of Pages:
-
100
- Publisher:
-
University of North Texas Press
- Publication Date:
-
2000-02-02
- Release Date:
-
2000-08-01
- ISBN / EAN:
-
9781574410839
- Weight:
-
159 g
- Dimensions:
-
15/23/1 cm
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