Ithaca: A Life in Four Fragments

by Travis Cebula

Travis Cebula’s newest offering Ithaca asks, “Who is Ithaca and what does she learn?” His complex characterization of Ithaca guided by the tender polyphony in vibrant lines such as, “the land of high renown is in murmuring too numerous,” carefully develops this question into the intricate voyage a name undertakes between ports of signification. As she alternately becomes a “frail nest, a country, or a daughter,” Ithaca encourages us to ponder, “can real love exist between their absolute if?” For Cebula, the emphatic answer is yes. By conceiving “if” as a sail tugging us through the varieties of love each transformation embodies, Ithaca evolves into a voyage that arrives at the resonant pleasure found in the pitch and roll of an imaginary country and its mellifluous citizen.

—James Belflower

Genres: Poetry

100 pages, Paperback

First published November 29, 2012

About the author

Travis Cebula currently resides in Golden, Colorado. His poetry, photographs, essays, and stories have appeared in or are forthcoming from New American Writing, BlazeVOX, Tarpaulin Sky, Aufgabe, Versal, Eleven-Eleven, NO/ON, The Talking River Review, Monkey Puzzle, E-Ratio, Cricket Online Review, Otoliths, In Stereo Magazine, Fact-Simile, Bombay Gin, Dear Sir, Trunk of Delirium, The Strip, Right Hand Pointing, Leveler, and Whrrds. His most recent collection of poetry, One Year in a Paper Cinema , is available now from BlazeVOX Books and Amazon.com. Travis is also the founder and editor of Shadow Mountain Press, specializing in limited-edition chapbooks. He teaches at the Left Bank Writers Retreat in Paris in June.

Reviews

[Joe]

This line:
“a voice is no place for levity”
is indicative of what one is getting into here. In following the life of Ithaca (his response to Paterson’s city-person?) Travis’ attention is upon patterns and archetype and—this is what I love about it—the collection’s chiseled runs of couplets and tercets working across the space of the page read as if they could have been written ANY time alongside or after William Carlos Williams or maybe way back, getting stoned w/Sappho:
her knuckle, darkened
with orange-oil, raps

quietly against the screen door,
begs to admit.

it is not her sound or her
perfume but our own glimmering
we recognize in the grey

hair of her going away.

This puts the book beyond banking on nostalgia for another time but binding together slices of time stacked on one another. Or maybe outside of time? I don’t know. Something about time. Anyway, I found myself moved by this book, its construction of another life from beginning to end with incredible, suggestive economy. Scratched an itch I didn’t know I had, occupying, as it does, a sweet spot between WCW & HD. Maybe it’s the minimalism that’s so piercing. Everyone (me too)is so into maximalism or loose plain speech and really straining to artfully appear artless.

“there was no
attempt at knowing.

intimacy did not occur;
virtues were shipwrecks

and the strangest
that have ever been.”

[T. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vacillated between 4-5. Many, many breathtaking lines. Intellectually and syntactically a compelling book.

[Deborah Poe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vacillated between 4-5. Many, many breathtaking lines. Intellectually and syntactically a compelling book.