Baker avows that sight is visionary and that Vision is transformative. This is her "massive simplicity," a Blake-like virtue surely, in which the disruption of the eye by light, of words by breath (and by the breath-taking line breaks that are Andrea Baker's most beautiful signature) is a chaos becoming, quite simply, cosmic and wide. -Donald Revell, from his introduction
The authority of memory becomes tenuous when confronted with the imagination. Moral or not, the transformational power wins out, that is, until a singular vision/delusion is attained. The part of irony is to provide as apparent objective unity that results solely from subjective assertion: "An echo is a mountain."
Like Wind Loves a Window releases an immaculately compressed freedom into the world. While Stevens asserted out of the phenomenological world, creating a rhetorical allegory across a mental pasture (inhabited by rabbits, candles, studies, angels), Baker asserts within phenomena perceived, an inverted negative capability by which all becomes assimilated into the “body” of the perceiver, admitting subjectivity into the poem while declining to separate perception from object. Between the mind and the world, action and belief synthesize, or occur in precise symbiosis, which gives the functions of the mind the authority to impress upon the world while the world impresses upon it.
I'm not going to pretend I got some deep meaning out of this. Which might be okay if it at least sounded beautiful, but it didn't. It either sounded disjointed or jumbled together, and I think there were a couple typos but it was hard to tell because the rules of the English language were completely disregarded, and it just didn't work for me. Gorgeous title though, and a couple amazing lines, but when all one can understand in a poem is a single line, we have a problem. If I had wanted a puzzle, I would have gone to the puzzle store, not the library.
In early sept 2006, late late late one night. I don't know calm. In a clean calm. Day calm of an idea on some sort of clean table. Surface the page calm. Nothing missing or stretched out calm. In the pocket calm. Up calm.
I did not read this book. However, I did read her chapbook pubbed by PSA entitled Gilda. No, this is not about Gilda Radner. But it is quite lovely. None-the-less.