Escaping the House of Certainty: Poems

by Susan Ludvigson

Escaping the House of Certainty marks a departure from Susan Ludvigson's previous verse and taps a new experimental vein for the poet. Some of the poems resemble abstract art--a collage of fragments, alternately floating and spliced, evoking personal associations and approaching a three-dimensional sentience. In a series of prose poems, Ludvigson combines dreams with elements from French villages, creating surprising new revelations forged from the unconscious and the known. For lighthearted relief, she provides an assortment of recipe "Eggplant Provenç a Homily," "French Bread," and "Gratin Dauphinoise," to name a few. Being and nothingness, art and life, body and spirit--these are the themes of Escaping the House of Certainty, an intriguing, essential piece in Ludvigson's oeuvre. They are still digging, dinosaur bones piling up like the lies of lovers. This year, a new species. Its eggs trapped in silt are stone. Remember the way we imagined the future, blind to the slow hardening of possibility? Unearthing new knowledge, we must revise the reluctant past. Even a pale flame of a woman can grieve longer than anyone knows for her own petrified eggs, for a husband not deaf to her beauty, but mute. She stood here too, on the rim of this crater, watching the dig. She toured the museum where even the most surprising lives are arranged behind glass, classified.
--"Esperaza"

72 pages, Hardcover

First published February 29, 2000

Reviews

[Trice Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ludvigson is interested primarily in borders, between mind and body, eggplants, memory, guilt, and Bin Laden. She plays a lot with form to communicate this. At certain points, the poems reach greater clarity when you give up the need to read left to right and follow the path she creates. Cool stuff

[Zarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5*