Orange Roses

by Lucy Ives

Poetry. Essays. ORANGE ROSES, written over a 10-year timeframe, enacts a poet's the process of her discovering what a poem might be. In this work, there is hardly a difference between dream and reality—the line between that which exists and that which is merely a construction of perspective is blurred in any attempt to portray a given experience. Ives questions not only what we can get away with, in attempting to add to or alter whatever "poetry" or "literature" might officially be—but, too, what will we be able to take away? Writing is less about choosing between worlds, she suggests in this exploratory book, than it is about existing in one where life and our perceptions thereof are complementary.

Genres: Poetry

104 pages, Paperback

First published September 15, 2013

About the author

Lucy Ives is the author of several books of poetry and short prose, including The Hermit and the novella nineties. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, Lapham’s Quarterly, and at newyorker.com. For five years she was an editor with the online magazine Triple Canopy. A graduate of Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from New York University. She teaches at the Pratt Institute and is currently editing a collection of writings by the artist Madeline Gins.

Reviews

[Thomas Petrino · Rating 5 out of 5]

In “Orange Roses,” included in her book of the same title, Lucy Ives writes: “Reason is a language. In this sense it is no more or less perfect than any other language.” This statement suggests that reason is merely an option among many competitors, that there are methods other than reason that could be useful for communicating ideas. This line is interesting when we examine Orange Roses in its entirety. Oxford defines reason as “the power of the mind to think, understand, and form judgments by a process of logic.” With this in mind, we wonder: is her writing logical? Does Ives use reason? Perhaps she utilizes some other language. Orange Roses is an interrogation of the utility and nature of reason. It is a book about making sense.

Orange Roses has been described as a collection of poems and essays, but in my view, every entry in this book can (and should) be classified as a poem. Perhaps this is because a central theme to Ives’s work here is an exploration of what it means to be a poem. Ives’ writing is cogent because she challenges us to view works like “On Imitation,” a sprawling 10-page artifact accompanied by photographs, alongside more obviously poetic works. For example, “European,” the poem where we first see an allusion to orange roses, is definitively a poem; it is made up of six fragmentary lines separated by breaks of varying size. “In Sonnets,” a collection of five trains of thought of fourteen lines each, is obviously poetic, too.

Further complicating this question of genre is the inclusion of “Early Poem,” which is the book's strongest entry. This piece includes the word “poem” in its title, but doesn’t make use of line breaks, and yet is crafted in such a thrilling way that it would feel almost sacrilegious to call it an essay. Almost every sentence in “Early Poem” contains a reference to the sentence itself. For instance, the fifty-fifth sentence in “Early Poem” is, “Sentence fifty-five is a sentence about picking up the phone.” The obsessively self-referential storytelling invites us to think about language and reconsider our conceptions of genre. “Early Poem” is just one of several poems in this book that blurs the line between language and content; that is, the language is the content. In this way, Orange Roses is persuasive. Ives may not persuade her reader of the answers to any questions, but she convinces us of the questions we should be asking. What is a poem?

If Orange Roses is an exploration of the poem, it is equally an exploration of the self. Which self? In the first entry in this collection, “The Poem,” Ives writes that “The fallacy of the poem is beautiful because it is already the embodiment of a reader….” Is the self we are exploring ourselves, then? It is no accident that Ives’s observation about “the fallacy of the poem” is the very first thing she wants us to read. If, throughout the entire book, we keep in mind her assertion that poems are “embodiments” of us, the reader, Ives amplifies her poems’ quality of wonderment. The poems in this collection make my brain tingle, because Ives asks us to fathom what a poem would be without a reader. It wouldn’t.

Perhaps the self we are exploring here is actually herself: Lucy Ives. It is worth noting here that the only time Ives includes her own name in the collection is in the final stanza of “Orange Roses,” a stanza that is scratched out with a strikethrough. What do we make of the fact that the only time Ives includes the word “Lucy” she crosses it out? Perhaps it is a rejection of the self. What do we think of the discovery that the poem “European” appears again, in its entirety, 28 pages later, in the longer work “Orange Roses?” Does it evoke a sense of nostalgia for an earlier time in the book, by extension evoking nostalgia for an earlier time in the reader’s life? Or in Ives’s life? Again, Ives doesn’t provide any answers, but she coaxes us into asking audacious questions.

How does Ives produce this sense of ambiguity? She cleverly plays with meaning to achieve a mundane polysemy. For example, in “Catalogue,” Ives offers us the line, “They lay in bed; more honestly, on the floor; most honest, nude on the carpet under a blanket except for their socks.” Does she mean they are nude except for their socks? Or does she mean they are completely under the blanket except for their socks? There's not much at stake here; either the sock-clad feet are under a blanket or they are not. But in a delightful way, Ives makes us wonder what she means.

With the closing line of “Early Poem,” Ives makes us interrogate possible meanings even further. “Please never forget I was the one who told you that,” she writes.  The word “that” is simple. Even so, it can be interpreted in at least two intriguing ways. “Early Poem,” which up until this point has been a collection of ninety-nine correctly punctuated sentences, ends with this line, which is grammatically complete but lacks a period. Is this final line complete, and simply missing a period, “that” being used as a pronoun? If so, what is its antecedent? Or is “that” being used as a conjunction, thus implying that something is supposed to follow “that,” which Ives is omitting? Both options are probable, and both readings of this line are packed with mystery.

Orange Roses reads like a glimpse into a poet’s personal journal. Each poem seems simultaneously finished and incomplete. “Mind-blowing” is cliché, but with Orange Roses, it fits the bill. “Thought-provoking” would be an understatement.

[Lari · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reason is a language. In this sense it is no more or less perfect than other languages.

[K · Rating 5 out of 5]

this coverrr

[Andy Stallings · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was resistant to this book, and throughout the main portion, it oscillated between poems that worked with my reading and poems that didn't. For a long time, I found the narrating stance irritating -- a writer writing about writing and being unable to really accomplish that one thing well. In the end, however, the book got me. After a series of alternations between connecting with the poems and retreating from the poems, the last poem really knocked me out. It was perfect, in a way. It made me feel a real longing for the feeling of being young, uncertain, and able to just leave a place without consequences or, really, even being noticed leaving. I also found a lot to like in "Orange Roses," the sequence, though I'll need to return to it at some point to really see what's there.

[Eric Komosa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Actually magical. Highly improbable. Sebald.