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The Sounding Machine
Winner of the 2011 Accents Publishing International Poetry Book Contest, The Sounding Machine is an exquisite collection of poetry that interrogates memory, culture and loss with courage and compassion. The poems are powerful and urgent and ultimately, with great empathy, they offer solace and the possibility of wringing beauty from ruin. Judge Lisa Williams, who selected the manuscript, provides a perceptive foreword as an entry into the book.
- GenresPoetry
72 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2012
8 people want to read
About the author
Patty Paine
10 books52 followersAs Author:
City of Small Fires
Grief & Other Animals
The Sounding Machine (Accents Publishing)
Feral (Imaginary Friend Press)
Elegy & Collapse (Finishing Line Press)
As Editor:
The Donkey Lady and Other Tales from the Arabian Gulf (Berkshire Academic Press)
Gathering theTide: An Anthology of Contemporary Arabian Gulf Poetry (Ithaca.Garnet)
Editor of Diode Poetry Journal and Diode Editions
Associate Professor, VCU School of the Arts in Doha, Qatar
City of Small Fires
Grief & Other Animals
The Sounding Machine (Accents Publishing)
Feral (Imaginary Friend Press)
Elegy & Collapse (Finishing Line Press)
As Editor:
The Donkey Lady and Other Tales from the Arabian Gulf (Berkshire Academic Press)
Gathering theTide: An Anthology of Contemporary Arabian Gulf Poetry (Ithaca.Garnet)
Editor of Diode Poetry Journal and Diode Editions
Associate Professor, VCU School of the Arts in Doha, Qatar
Ratings & Reviews
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 31, 2012
Paine gives us a book of terrible beauty--harrowing and tender. This is a difficlut life laid down on the page without self-pity or sentimentality. You will not be sorry to put this one in your book queue.
February 24, 2014
In an online interview (First Book Interviews, #63, Jan 2013), Paine talks about the title of her book.
“I discovered that a sounding machine is a pre-sonar nautical device that drops a line to measure water depth. I liked the idea of plumbing the depths, sending a weighted pianoforte wire into the unknown to bring back something substantial, something knowable. It seemed an apt metaphor for a book of poems, and perhaps this book in particular since it delves into some dark places.”
http://firstbookinterviews.blogspot.c...
Paine plumbs the depths of family, culture, illness, and loss. The central person is Paine’s mother, a Korean war bride who immigrates to the US to raise her family and have a new and hopefully better life. Language is a broad metaphor in this collection. There is the obvious issue of native language, Korean and English, and a child denied knowledge of Korean.
My mother forbid Korean so I craved her
forbidden tongue,
(Half-Korean)
There is also the narrative language of Paine’s poetry. The book opens with “Ars Poetica,” which concludes with a warning.
I just want
you to be careful, because
sometimes a poem can lie.
What a powerful thought to plant at the beginning of a book of poetry. The issue of truth comes up again. In a long poem, Paine describes coming “home from school, I’d find empty/bottles of Demerol.”
She goes on to tell the reader about the many times the EMTs came to her house. Image after image follows, and the poem ends with these lines:
All this
to say there are things you never forget.
I should tell you, there was no park, no
red-tailed hawk, no bus ride, but everything
else is true.
(The Vision Serpent)
The book is organized in four parts, titled Part One, etc. Part Two is a series of clever prose poems which establish the backstory. The first few alternate between voices of the Korean mother and the American soldier father. Then the voice shifts from the father to the daughter. We see the mother’s physical and mental decline after the father divorces her.
Toward the end of Part Three we learn the mother has cancer. We also get more insight into the daughter’s difficult relationship with her mother.
but she is my mother, ravaged
by the ruthless industry
of metastasizing cells.
If she were washed clean
of the past, if I had known
there was so little time,
I might have held her
wrecked body in my arms.
(My Mother Stepping from the Tub)
Paine certainly succeeds at measuring the depths with her deft use of language and rich imagery.
“I discovered that a sounding machine is a pre-sonar nautical device that drops a line to measure water depth. I liked the idea of plumbing the depths, sending a weighted pianoforte wire into the unknown to bring back something substantial, something knowable. It seemed an apt metaphor for a book of poems, and perhaps this book in particular since it delves into some dark places.”
http://firstbookinterviews.blogspot.c...
Paine plumbs the depths of family, culture, illness, and loss. The central person is Paine’s mother, a Korean war bride who immigrates to the US to raise her family and have a new and hopefully better life. Language is a broad metaphor in this collection. There is the obvious issue of native language, Korean and English, and a child denied knowledge of Korean.
My mother forbid Korean so I craved her
forbidden tongue,
(Half-Korean)
There is also the narrative language of Paine’s poetry. The book opens with “Ars Poetica,” which concludes with a warning.
I just want
you to be careful, because
sometimes a poem can lie.
What a powerful thought to plant at the beginning of a book of poetry. The issue of truth comes up again. In a long poem, Paine describes coming “home from school, I’d find empty/bottles of Demerol.”
She goes on to tell the reader about the many times the EMTs came to her house. Image after image follows, and the poem ends with these lines:
All this
to say there are things you never forget.
I should tell you, there was no park, no
red-tailed hawk, no bus ride, but everything
else is true.
(The Vision Serpent)
The book is organized in four parts, titled Part One, etc. Part Two is a series of clever prose poems which establish the backstory. The first few alternate between voices of the Korean mother and the American soldier father. Then the voice shifts from the father to the daughter. We see the mother’s physical and mental decline after the father divorces her.
Toward the end of Part Three we learn the mother has cancer. We also get more insight into the daughter’s difficult relationship with her mother.
but she is my mother, ravaged
by the ruthless industry
of metastasizing cells.
If she were washed clean
of the past, if I had known
there was so little time,
I might have held her
wrecked body in my arms.
(My Mother Stepping from the Tub)
Paine certainly succeeds at measuring the depths with her deft use of language and rich imagery.
April 12, 2012
Already in love with this book and am only halfway through. Paine's poems are vivid and heartbreaking.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews