What do you think?
Rate this book
Light Light
Moving from the Enlightenment science of natural history to the contemporary science of global warming, "Light Light" is a provocative engagement with the technologies and languages that shape discourses of knowing. It bridges the histories of botany, empire, and mind to take up the claim of "objectivity" as the dissolution of a discrete self and thus explores the mind's movement toward and with the world. The poems in "Light Light" range from the epigrammatic to the experimental, from the narrative to the lyric, consistently exploring the way language captures the undulation of a mind's working, how that rhythm becomes the embodiment of thought, and how that embodiment forms a politics engaged with the environment and its increasing alterations.
120 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2013
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 24, 2022
Zhuangzi (circa 370 - 286 BCE) writes of an Old Woman with skin "as bright as snow". Asked how she achieves her childlike complexion, the Old Woman answers, "By clarifying and decanting day after day, little by little I perceive the whole world, things, and even life itself as external to me. They no longer burden my vitality. I live then in the transparency of morning."
To keep by purifying, life eludes its own grasp, is fed.
Breath by breath, thought by thought, an incremental withdrawal leaves not nothing bu an openness that assumes the gradualness of dimension.
There, vitality comes and goes.
The Old Woman takes shape around, is the shape of, a gentle wind passing through the pear tree.
* * *
Simone Weil writes of her time working in a vineyard, "I recited Our Father in Greek every day before work, and I repeated it very often through once each morning with absolute attention [....] At times the very first words tear my thoughts from my body and transport it to a plac outsside space whee there is neither perspective not point of view."
Perspective is torn in an attention, I think, specific to morning and its relinquishments, to a calm that precedes individuation.
Morning, thought, and body come to exist outside space.
Diffuse and transforming, attention emanates indefinitely here, a vital form of being, the morning's transparency.
It clears a way; wind pulses through the vineyard, breathes between branches and leaves, turns them into breath.
* * *
Qualities of light:
slant, reflective,
colour, illumination
empathy
without seizure
light's ability to
receive a bee
an ocean a
ship while
retracting itself
from view.
* * *
To trace a trade route
by which something did
not happen:
knowledge
of the abortive
powers of
the peacock
flower did
not travel
with the plant
to European gardens and curiosity cabinets and was never noted in medical encyclopedias or herbalist manuals.
* * *
This the haunting dissension, an elaboration of blind field, its quickening cast out from the eye, shivering into gestures of birds, the ground mottled with flight. The clothes on the bank tell the river of others. Side-saddled skirts hang the horse's back. The heartbeat of the horse. To touch the stake of pulse, marrow light held in the hand, whalebone stays hovering the skirt. Ghost's corsetry. The way, falling at a certain angle, rain severs the eye.
* * *
(the feeling of being
as it might tremble
in an animal
little is such mooring
you might tend a quiver
between you and
the dog on your lap
little, you say
as you wake
pulling yourself
through that tremble
together again)
* * *
Keats writes in a letter to his friend Reynolds: "Let us open our leaves like a flower and be passive and receptive [...] I was led in these thoughts, dear Reynolds, by the beauty of the morning operation on a sense of idleness - I have not read any Books - the Morning said I was right - I had no idea but of the Morning."
The beauty of the morning, its transparency, becomes thought.
Dissolves identity in reception, in feeling an idea of the Morning.
This feeling belongs to no one in particular; "a sense of Idleness" is as much the beauty of the Morning's as Keats's own, Keats who becomes for the morning the Morning.
How astonishingly abstract the body and soul are by comparison.
The Morning sends out a small wind, carries a bee along, and brushes pollen from the combs of the bee's legs.
Pollen lingers in a swirl and surfaces on the open cup of a poppy.
* * *
The image a pale blue
if the leaf is semi-transparent
white if it is opaque
* * *
Agnes Martin writes of her gridwork painting "Morning" (1965): "To myself and to some others there is a lot of difference between one work and another - difference in meaning. There are many different happinesses and blisses. 'Morning' a wonderful dawn, soft, and fresh - before daily care takes hold. It is about how we feel."
About feeling that extends along a line, a plane, a field of attention.
The gridwork sketches beyond the opacity of daily care, allowing happiness and bliss to be perceived as morning, its transparency.
It moves in the realm of the physical and concrete without being encumbered by their limits.
Intersecting winds, "sublimely unemphatic," let life pass by.
Contentment in that passing.
* * *
the light uninterpretable
A moonless night.
A strange mountain lightness at the top of the hill.
There is more sky here between two valleys than any other place.
It has a strange effect with the dark at night.
Seems a kind of light.
To keep by purifying, life eludes its own grasp, is fed.
Breath by breath, thought by thought, an incremental withdrawal leaves not nothing bu an openness that assumes the gradualness of dimension.
There, vitality comes and goes.
The Old Woman takes shape around, is the shape of, a gentle wind passing through the pear tree.
- Wind Scene, pg. 18
* * *
Simone Weil writes of her time working in a vineyard, "I recited Our Father in Greek every day before work, and I repeated it very often through once each morning with absolute attention [....] At times the very first words tear my thoughts from my body and transport it to a plac outsside space whee there is neither perspective not point of view."
Perspective is torn in an attention, I think, specific to morning and its relinquishments, to a calm that precedes individuation.
Morning, thought, and body come to exist outside space.
Diffuse and transforming, attention emanates indefinitely here, a vital form of being, the morning's transparency.
It clears a way; wind pulses through the vineyard, breathes between branches and leaves, turns them into breath.
- Wind Scene, pg. 26
* * *
Qualities of light:
slant, reflective,
colour, illumination
empathy
without seizure
light's ability to
receive a bee
an ocean a
ship while
retracting itself
from view.
- pg. 34
* * *
To trace a trade route
by which something did
not happen:
knowledge
of the abortive
powers of
the peacock
flower did
not travel
with the plant
to European gardens and curiosity cabinets and was never noted in medical encyclopedias or herbalist manuals.
- pg. 42
* * *
This the haunting dissension, an elaboration of blind field, its quickening cast out from the eye, shivering into gestures of birds, the ground mottled with flight. The clothes on the bank tell the river of others. Side-saddled skirts hang the horse's back. The heartbeat of the horse. To touch the stake of pulse, marrow light held in the hand, whalebone stays hovering the skirt. Ghost's corsetry. The way, falling at a certain angle, rain severs the eye.
- pg. 55
* * *
(the feeling of being
as it might tremble
in an animal
little is such mooring
you might tend a quiver
between you and
the dog on your lap
little, you say
as you wake
pulling yourself
through that tremble
together again)
- pg. 61
* * *
Keats writes in a letter to his friend Reynolds: "Let us open our leaves like a flower and be passive and receptive [...] I was led in these thoughts, dear Reynolds, by the beauty of the morning operation on a sense of idleness - I have not read any Books - the Morning said I was right - I had no idea but of the Morning."
The beauty of the morning, its transparency, becomes thought.
Dissolves identity in reception, in feeling an idea of the Morning.
This feeling belongs to no one in particular; "a sense of Idleness" is as much the beauty of the Morning's as Keats's own, Keats who becomes for the morning the Morning.
How astonishingly abstract the body and soul are by comparison.
The Morning sends out a small wind, carries a bee along, and brushes pollen from the combs of the bee's legs.
Pollen lingers in a swirl and surfaces on the open cup of a poppy.
- Wind Scene, pg. 71
* * *
The image a pale blue
if the leaf is semi-transparent
white if it is opaque
- Along a Lambent Contour, pg. 88
* * *
Agnes Martin writes of her gridwork painting "Morning" (1965): "To myself and to some others there is a lot of difference between one work and another - difference in meaning. There are many different happinesses and blisses. 'Morning' a wonderful dawn, soft, and fresh - before daily care takes hold. It is about how we feel."
About feeling that extends along a line, a plane, a field of attention.
The gridwork sketches beyond the opacity of daily care, allowing happiness and bliss to be perceived as morning, its transparency.
It moves in the realm of the physical and concrete without being encumbered by their limits.
Intersecting winds, "sublimely unemphatic," let life pass by.
Contentment in that passing.
- Wind Scene, pg. 94
* * *
the light uninterpretable
A moonless night.
A strange mountain lightness at the top of the hill.
There is more sky here between two valleys than any other place.
It has a strange effect with the dark at night.
Seems a kind of light.
- pg. 109
June 6, 2024
This moved between a four and five. Finally though, too many poem pages dog eared for this debut to give less than five.
April 20, 2014
This moved between a four and five. Finally though, too many poem pages dog eared for this debut to give less than five.
April 17, 2017
I admit, I don't read a lot of poetry. With it being National Poetry Month though, I thought I'd expand my horizons. "Light Light" is a poetry collection that focuses on the environment, particularly issues of global warming. It was so unique to read a collection of poems that didn't focus on self or love, but rather looking at the natural world around us. The poems were easy to digest, but packed a big punch.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews