Distillo

by Basma Kavanagh

In her debut collection, Basma Kavanagh engages the natural world and seeks to explore our relationship to it. Hers is a poetics of description which subverts scientific observation and the authoritative language of nomenclature for mythopoetic ends. In the opening section (“Moisture”), precipitation is dissected and categorized, but ultimately the deluge of “rain making rain, /making rain” overwhelms controlled interrogation and undulating imagery saturates everything. Nomenclature reappears elsewhere in the book, attempting to anchor object poems about west-coast flora and fauna–salmon, elk, bear, bigleaf maple, bog myrtle–which otherwise drift toward the mythworld and gesture in the direction of the ethereal and the totemic. Understanding that language can be most precise when it harbours ambiguity and surprise, Kavanagh experiments with pattern poems and the layering of multiple voices in her attempt to express “a fullness /an absence /of self.” This is a book which turns over rocks and looks under them in search of truth in its soft, damp hiding places, poems which instruct us to “[d]escend. Blend /your knowing with the breath of earth”.

Genres: Poetry

91 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[bird · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cryptic, maddening, obsessively detailed descriptions that feel more surgical than conventionally vivid. Expectedly impressive in its language, though the personality here is what makes things work. Somewhere between beautiful observation and mythic horrified landscaping from object to eye - more importantly, from pen to page.