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Engraved
Poetry. Inspired by nineteenth-century Webster's Dictionary engravings, ENGRAVED explores a fantastic land at the edge of obsolescence and loss. The poems teem with whaling schooners, passenger pigeons, a bayonet, cupola furnace, clavichord words and objects at the brink of extinction, placed in and around the death of the poet's father. But these poems also create, or recreate; through illustration, music, and myth, the imagination here allows the dead to reappear, mostly, and sometimes also lets them go. Located at the intersection of art and grief, these poems honor anyone who has set down lines and vanished from the earth."
- GenresPoetry
36 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 2013
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Displaying 1 of 2 reviews
January 24, 2021
Engraved, by Anna George Meek, 2013. I love reading Anna George Meek’s poetry. It’s not among the easiest, most accessible poetry, but invest some time, spirit, and thought, and you are rewarded with insight, an intelligent human’s view of and dealing with the world, occasionally humor and occasionally tears. What more can you ask for?
This is the third book of Meek’s I have read. Each one has lent a different perspective, conveyed different learnings. I must confess part of the enjoyment/fulfillment of reading poetry like this is the joy of detection, of glimpsing and pursuing the meaning of what is presented. Because it is worth it. As Meek writes in her acknowledgements, “the mind becomes double-jointed, triple-jointed, and the best parts of imagination emerge.” That’s a pretty good reward, too.
Engraved had me connecting the death of Meek’s father and her own grieving with both historical and (perhaps) spiritual transcendence. The engravers of the illustrations in dictionaries of the past (one source of the books title) are unnamed, mostly unremembered, but their lines remain. That goes for those who have engraved us, and engraved our forebears, too. What wisdom remains, what memory, what trauma is engraved in us? It’s worth delving into. Meek does so in the poems in Engraved, and by doing so, invites us to do so as well. And, as she reminds us in “Cephalata”
It is possible to love
that which has utterly disappeared.
This is the third book of Meek’s I have read. Each one has lent a different perspective, conveyed different learnings. I must confess part of the enjoyment/fulfillment of reading poetry like this is the joy of detection, of glimpsing and pursuing the meaning of what is presented. Because it is worth it. As Meek writes in her acknowledgements, “the mind becomes double-jointed, triple-jointed, and the best parts of imagination emerge.” That’s a pretty good reward, too.
Engraved had me connecting the death of Meek’s father and her own grieving with both historical and (perhaps) spiritual transcendence. The engravers of the illustrations in dictionaries of the past (one source of the books title) are unnamed, mostly unremembered, but their lines remain. That goes for those who have engraved us, and engraved our forebears, too. What wisdom remains, what memory, what trauma is engraved in us? It’s worth delving into. Meek does so in the poems in Engraved, and by doing so, invites us to do so as well. And, as she reminds us in “Cephalata”
It is possible to love
that which has utterly disappeared.
Displaying 1 of 2 reviews