Passenger: Poems

by Susan Maxwell

The poems in Passenger shift between the mythology of the Middle East and the bombed-out cities of the former Yugoslavia, the ancient Roman tale of Romulus and Remus, the choreography of murder, and the hawking of grisly war memorabilia on destroyed city streets. Influenced by Susan Maxwell’s experiences as a relief worker in a Croatian refugee camp at the height of the Bosnian War in the 1990s, these poems document a nameless, mythological war that has collapsed the boundaries between contemporary and ancient history and between personal memory and folklore. The poems’ tender voices wake to find themselves fused to objects or to the dead, and begin to speak those first precarious, childlike, and prophetic words that will allow them to reestablish contact with the outside world--a world that has become “one / sentence long repeating so the last chain / could sing while it murdered the first.”

96 pages, Paperback

First published October 24, 2005

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Reviews

[Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

For Maxwell, the relationship between language and landscape is circular, meaning the landscape can be affected by language, and the landscape can influence language. Most of this occurs in the poems when a description of something from the natural world, like milkweed, get condensed into a style that is figurative, but difficulty figurative. I wonder sometimes about the level of difficulty Maxwell brings into her poems. At what point do stylistic decisions call too much attention to language, so that they aren't just sensual vocality, but conceptual impediment?