Thread by Michael Palmer

by Michael Palmer

Michael Palmer s new collection is structured in two parts, What I Did NotSay and Thread, subtitled Stanzas in Counterlight. It begins with a beautifulsuite of poems featuring The Master of Shadows (first glimpsed in his 2006collection The Company of Moths). The counterlight of the title section shinesin shafts of Palmer s ever-surprising ironic wit, which is given to sidelong parallelleaps. Several poems in Thread directly address our endless wars, yet evenin sorrow and rage the poems still glow with wonder. In multiphonic passages, voices speak from a decentered place, yet are grounded in the central rootednessof the whole history of poetry and culture that has gone before. In his newpoems, signature palimpsests create complex cycles of thought, returning andreturning via echoes to what he has called the layering process, the processof accretion and the process of emergence. Say / that whatever comes / goes. / / The Shadow knows / nothing / such / / His calling. / Round his / listing / / House / the bindweed / grows.

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published May 27, 2011

About the author

Michael Palmer is a poet associated with the Language Poetry movement; he is also a translator and has worked on art with painters and dancers.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Reviews

[Sandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

A simple honesty and fluency of language with no apologies for literary references or steps into personal memory or alternate universes. Comforting in my particular mood of grieving and unease. I am drawn to the poems that play off Gennady Aygi's work which I also enjoy.

[Rick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chimera, helicopters are birthing their young into the waves.

[C. Varn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Palmer's wit is wry, and his simplicity is deceptive and complicated. Palmer's sometimes seeming direct language involves personal and literary and philosophical references without any apology for the seeming alienation. Palmer also knows how to compose cycles of poems whose interplay and intertextuality adds to the poems without overwhelming their individuality. Palmer repeats similar motifs and actions but subtly shifts them in any given poem cycle. All that is display in this books two sections, threads are layered like the tendrils of jellyfish on the cover: "The Classical Study," "Say"and "Difference "cycles are all rewarding in their layers in ways that remind one minimalism classical music.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 4 out of 5]

These are terse and smaller poems with a nice, hearthy sense of humor. Palmer was one of the best poets to emerge out of the early 1960s and developed out a healthy disregard for the politics of his peers such as Eliot or Pound, both of whom were fine poets, but asshats.

[Jeremy Allan · Rating 4 out of 5]

At some point I need to go back and read all of Michael Palmer's work from the beginning. Every time I fall on one of his collections, it offers me gifts. Thread is no different, in this sense. I will be looking forward to a moment in the future where I read it again.

[Holly Raymond · Rating 4 out of 5]

A sort of under-rated langpo dude, still writing exciting and challenging new stuff. Come on, read this. Please?

[Megan]

MP is such a comfort, even when writing of uncomfortable things. I always feel welcome in his literary landscapes, and find so many pleasures--and meanings--of reading addressed and enacted therein.

[Nancy]

If you want to learn how to write a series of poems, this is the book to check out.

[Benjamin Niespodziany · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm becoming a Palmer stan. Hazy and surreal dream sequences. Every poem is a world.

[Wesley]

Read on Internet Archive (borrowed for an hour)

[Brittany Mishra · Rating 3 out of 5]

The poems contained in this book have some originality. I appreciated the string of poems like “Difference” which are poems similar in subject and wording, but have a subtle difference between each one. It was an interesting set up and something I haven’t seen too often. In the beginning of this book I was intrigued, but the further and further I read, I became frustrated by the repetitiveness and the forced almost childish rhymes. What was original and interesting in the beginning grew tedious and old fast. I wanted the author to keep throwing me a loop and making me reassess my ideas of what poetry should be, but as the book wore on, I became disappointed. He didn’t change anything up, but kept using similar words and similar form and sentence structure. I gave this book three stars because I liked the direction of where it was going and I liked the originality in the beginning, but I also believe that he could have taken a step further and risked a little more.

[Christina M Rau · Rating 3 out of 5]

The world presented in the pages of Thread is confusing. It's a good kind of confusing for the most part. What did not make sense as actual ideas made sense through sound; Michael Palmer has a unique and skillful way of making language make sense even though it might not really make sense on the surface. That's probably why he's a L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poet. With a mix of prose poems, short poems, longer poems, and poems with all lengths of stanzas and lines, the collection offers a variety of rhythms that work together to build cohesion. However, because the beginning offered a series of what he calls "Classical Study" that did not quite work for me, I was a little off-balance for the rest of it.

[R.K. Cowles · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 1/2 stars