Mantic

by Maureen Alsop

Poetry. Maureen Alsop follows Apparition Wren with MANTIC, a poetry book that underscores the art of prediction as a means for rectifying disquiet when one is willing. You will be made to look toward spine-white shores, salt lakes at the empire's boundary. You will hear voices dwelling within the other voice. You will inhabit the shades turning in the grass at the doorway, sun-baked origins, amaurosis before language. You will dream of the past as a form of begging, the future as your face pressed between the landscape's burnished pages. You will not lie still."

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2013

About the author

Maureen Alsop is the winner of Harpur Palate's Milton Kessler Memorial Award, Bitter Oleander's Frances Locke Memorial Award, and Eleventh Muse' Poetry Prize. Her poetry has been thrice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her poems have appeared or pending in various journals including: Barrow Street, Columbia Journal, AGNI, among others. "

Reviews

[Matt McBride · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book of obscure methods of divination. Like all prophecy it is gnostic and elliptical. The taughtly lyric language is pure song.

[Patricia Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I run a workshop with a fantastic group of poets (been doing that since summer 2009) and Maureen joined us for a season a few years ago. She is also a frequent contributor to the Superstition Review blog. I really enjoyed working with her and I'm a big fan of her work. So it was such a treat to read this book.

The poems here evoke emotion through such powerful and complex images. I especially love the poem “Moth, Horse, Accident, Skin” for its musicality and subtle tone. And I love “The Arrival of Memory” for its haunting synesthesia. This is a book I could linger with for a long while--there are layers of image, figurative language, and meaning. The poet tasks so many risks to savor.

Some of my favorite moments:

“So I held my finger to the small
blossom of your eyelids.”

“Walk back keyless
into the sound of locks.”

“In that dream there was a slow articulation of my absence.”

“A little orchid of deaths
planted in exchange for want.”

“In the dark’s lexicon of mosquitoes there was that other dark.”

“But you are too worn. A little heart-thump between stratospheres.”

“Stitch by stitch in the shore’s seam I measured fog’s rotation.”

[Lissa Kiernan · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Mantic, Maureen Alsop turns over the decision-making to exotic, archaic divinations, to the shapes of mountains, the trajectory of arrows, the direction of bird calls. To swords, daggers, knives. To walking around a circle of letters until dizzy you fall down on the letters or in the direction to take (“Gyromancy”). With roughly half the poems in this 45-poem collection taking the form of a divination—floromancy, necromancy, eromancy, any mancy you fancy—Alsop, the fearless querent, has a poem that bears witness to the results.

Read my full review at Arsenic Lobster Poetry Journal: http://arseniclobster.magere.com/1rev...