Abracadabra

by Kimberly Lyons, Tony Fitzpatrick

Comprising her most recent poems and a selection of poems written from 1981-1991, Kimberly Lyons' Abracadabra brings us a poet with a striking and original voice. The work we find here gives a dreamlike view of the fractured cycles of birth and regeneration that mark our years, weeks, and hours. And Lyons' world is one where signs become objects and objects become signs--and her intent here is not so much to make sense of this world as to consider, sometimes in awe, its unmappable kernels. As she herself puts it in the book's opening "What is this place./But that's a sucker's question." With an evocative cover by Tony Fitzpatrick, Abracadabra is filled with elegant writing that accepts no limitations on its acts of imagination.

Genres: Poetry

104 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

Reviews

[Tentatively, Convenience]

I had the pleasure of meeting Kimberly Lyons at the publisher of this bk's home in NYC. I was interviewing people who knew Franz Kamin, who died last yr, & she was one of the interviewees. 1st off, I like the cover by Tony Fitzpatrick very much. It reminds me of some of the artwork in the fantastic Taschen edition of Alexander Roob's "Alchemy & Mysticism". The cover exudes cosmology, knowledge, vision, & good humor.

"Abracadabra" is, of course, the most common word associated w/ magic spells. Wave a magic wand, say "Abracadabra" & the desired magical change happens. In the poem entitled "Object Relations" Lyons writes:

"This summer I don't remember any paintings
did I just read the words "dry torches" or
think it
that seems to summarize the quandary"

& then, later in "'Tude" she writes:

"Say "party hat," or "red couch," "lime
green popsickle," and "taxi." "Umbrella
tree," "indigo," "come," and "promise.""

These might not seem to be incantatory words, but I like thinking of them that way. Some of those of us preoccupied w/ the power(s) of language spend time wondering whether attaching words to things simultaneously creates them in particular ways that may escape immediate notice. A person gets sad when there's a minimum of light for a long time? They have "S.A.D.", "Seasonal Affective Disorder" &, Abracadabra!, they now have a mental illness where they might've been previously just responding to a lack of a vitamin from the sun or an instinct for hibernation. But I digress.

I had trouble finding an entry point into these poems until I just took them as description - but a description in wch each sentence accumulates differently than they typically might in discursive paragraphs. A sentence describes something, the following sentence describes something else, the next something else again - & so on. Each sentence is quite full in & of itself & the sentences together, instead of focusing on details of a specified whole, refer to disparate details that the reader combines into an amorphous worldview. Take this, eg:

"
The Concise History of Painting

The cones and cubes of an ideal town
rise across the lake
of brown rumpled water
perfumed by egrets
and moths. And I fell asleep
briefly yesterday by the file cabinet
and had a dream, like a spasm.
Masses of clouds move sternly over
the ocean.
I suck on my violet duck.
I hit my spoon with the floor.
Call out to the
shadow of a saint
who has fallen under his horse.
"

The conceptual distance between each of these sentences is ambiguous. The 1st sentence cd be a description of a painting. The 2nd, b/c it describes an experience that "I" had may be autobiographical or not. The title implies possible references to paintings, the "I" implies 1st person - but they cd be both or neither. The sentences might form a narrative or they might be describing events far removed in time & place. As Jordan Davis' review on the back cover reads: "it is the unmoving objects that do the striking when there's a collision".

[Mills College Library]

811.54 L991a 2000