The Surface

by Laura Mullen

Selected by C. K. Williams as one of the five volumes published in 1991 in the National Poetry Series, The Surface was the first collection in Laura Mullen's acclaimed career.

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1991

About the author

Laura Mullen is the author of nine books: EtC (Solid Objects 2023), Complicated Grief, Enduring Freedom: A Little Book of Mechanical Brides, The Surface, After I Was Dead, Subject and Dark Archive, The Tales of Horror, and Murmur. Recognitions for her poetry include Ironwood’s Stanford Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Rona Jaffe Award, among other honors. Her work has been widely anthologized and is included in American Hybrid (Norton), and I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women (Les Figues). She is the Kenan Chair in the Humanities at Wake Forest University.

Reviews

[Teresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is sophisticated, accessible poetry with the most interesting, yet workable and purposeful, syntax I've ever come across (granted, I don't read a lot of poetry). The last line of the last piece (the title work) is perfect, though I imagine you'd need to read all that comes before it for optimum effect, especially with the phrase "the surface" being present in at least two other pieces. This is Mullen's debut work and I look forward to reading more by her.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Laura Mullen's poems from the early and mid-Eighties (her debut) mark her among the poets of her generation -- broadly speaking, the post-pastoral generation of American poets. In "Denial," in "Holmes Poems," in "The Poet Explains to Her Favorite Literary Critic (The Theft of a Hat)," as well as "Coloratura" and the title poem, readers have a Jamesian psychologist with a rhetorical range and linguistic exactness that's fiercely hailed. Her wit shines through so many of these, but here are lines from "Coloratura" that look forward to Murmur's "The Audience": "The guy on the street you slept with you aren't speaking to you recognize | By his legs as in I'd know those legs anywhere | So that it's not just context unless context is this," and, as so often in Mullen, it is. Force, as in attention, operates at such a corroborative limit in this author's literateness that it's enormously cheering to identify in her acts of incorporation. I'm sure there are poems here that must not please everyone, but this is a volume of declaration, and not the sort of thing to get over easily.

[Andrea Cote · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The Surface" is one of my oldest poetry books, continuously being reshelved and transported in boxes from Miami to Seattle and back across the country again. I got it at the Miami Book Fair after hearing the author read and it still echoes with me. Lines from it come back to me and I return to it after years at a time. "The poet presses against the mirror which wavers like water which lets him in..." I may be misquoting but these are the words that swim in my head and make up my living vocabulary. Like the stream of prose-like poetry flowing from Laura Mullen's text- my head/ my body is a fluid membrane where imagery comes up from inside and finds it's way in and out from and to "the surface." Isn't that the way it is with our most-loved and lived books?

[Zuska · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would give this book of poetry 3.5 stars if I could. Actually, I might give 5 stars to part one and 3 stars to part 2.
I read part one rather quickly - within a day and a half - and then got pulled away from the book by life. When I came back to part two, it was a struggle to finish. It felt like a completely different collection. In fact, for several days I kept thinking "I liked her other book of poetry so much better. I wonder if it was written before or after this one? Where did I put that other book?" And then I finally realized the other book was part one.

Nearly every poem in part one was a startling and wondrous experience. The seven poems that are The Holmes poems are a remarkable collaboration between 80's feminism and poetry in retelling Sherlock Holmes stories - 14 lines, and the entire story is there, from a perspective you've never seen before. Each tale involves a woman wronged by a stepfather or father, and/or some nefarious inheritance plot, and/or a woman in a troubled relationship. Just fascinating, and wonderfully done.
The poem "You" relates "three stories I know about knives." Again, storytelling done in the briefest of spaces, with maximum effect. At the end of the first very brief story, one feels the impact physically. It is a poem one can re-read many times, and experience its weight each time.

Perhaps someday I'll go back and try part two again, but nothing in that section remains in my memory, other than the clever play of syntax in each poem. Mullen is a master of innovative intricate syntax that creates subtle meaning and brings life to her poems, but in part two I felt lost in the craft work. This may be my failure to appreciate "difficult" poetry. All I can say is I loved The Surface Part One, I struggled with The Surface Part Two. Still I'm glad I read the whole thing.