Starsdown

by Jasper Bernes

Poetry. Jasper Bernes' magnificent and multi-layered first book, STARSDOWN, emerges as a record of Los Angeles as its physical space collapses into specters and marks, where "the sky is a swimming pool" and the signs and stars keep switching places. Beneath the glittering surface of the last American city, this book animates the profusion of irreconcilable vernaculars and histories that the city's "pastel-washed meta-burglaries" have contrived to make disappear. An archaeology of futures past and futures to come, STARSDOWN improvises a poetry which stands finally as actual invention and possibility.

Genres: Poetry

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[6r36.v1073t · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bernes’s Starsdown is alive with light; from the vivid, fractured topography of the cover to the incendiary Brecht epigraph to the “new, radiant, heatseeking and childsafe preposition” (11) of “Plaza,” the barnburning prose-block first poem, Starsdown crackles with speed and intensity. Do not let the poem’s lack of lineation lull you (there you are! Pinned as a butterfly in my book)— at a mere glance it looks harmless, but once in its innards, thrust into the heady acidwash of Bernes’s verse, round corners bare their teeth, gentle slopes reveal themselves to be a rapid succession of sheer cliffs. “Plaza” flows preposition “of” into proper waterbody Of, a long overdue nomination; this foregrounding of previously subordinate parts of speech ends not here; Bernes employs articles to confirm uncertainty, to magnify the glaring insufficiency of modern nouns like “city” and “face,” or perhaps to illustrate their complexity, the depth of their connotation: the aforementioned preposition “Was neither about nor to nor of the city…” (11)— simply put, no one article will do, and every. Sprawling “34 Parking Lots,” perhaps further charting the contours of Of, engages in similarly evocative articular reevaluation: “Waters divide into the and a face” (13)— here articles churn as engines of specificity, coming to a crest before crashing to uncertainty again, only to reform as is their wont. We continue in Bernes’s decidedly aqueous humor through “Nine Pools,” dripping past “Topanga Beach” and other aquatic delights, to chart his dry desert megalopolis defined by what it is not, wet, except unless you count the stolen water spirited about in pipes and in our bodies divided into “the and a face” after all.

[Tim Kahl · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars. Most of the time I thoroughly enjoyed Bernes's language distortions and the ideological wrapper that contained it. However, at times the strategy for how the language was consistently made new fell short of its attempt to embody some sense of totality. Does the revolution to upset the real need some sense of the familiar?

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

# One can transmit talk < but not measles, by telephone
and in this way > nothing you say means exactly nothing

Depth (0) <> Surface (I) <> trampoline the tensed edges
fling into low dull orbits > waste water waist deep in freak freeze...

[Steve]

http://odalisqued.blogspot.com/2007/0..., http://lauraderives.blogspot.com/2007...

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Freeways

[Mills College Library]

811.6 B525s 2007