Gap Gardening: Selected Poems

by Rosmarie Waldrop

An essential edition of a major avant-garde “Waldrop compels us to seek out new superlatives” (Ben Lerner, Jacket ) Rosmarie Waldrop says Gap Gardening “spans forty years of exploring the language I breathe and move in and that continues to condition me even while I try to contribute to it. It tracks my turn from verse to prose poems, to focusing on the sentence and its boundaries, my increasing reliance on collage and source texts as a way of engaging with other voices, of being in dialogue.” Gap Gardening also traces Waldrop’s growing sense of writing as an exploration of what happens in between. Between words, sentences, people, cultures. Between fragment and flow, thinking and feeling, mind and body.  For the first time, we have a complete and clear view of the work of a great and inquiring, brave and indispensable poet.

Genres: Poetry

256 pages, Paperback

First published April 20, 2016

About the author

Rosmarie Waldrop (born August 24, 1935), née Sebald, is a contemporary American poet, translator and publisher. Born in Germany, she has lived in the United States since 1958. She has lived in Providence, Rhode Island since the late 1960s. Waldrop is coeditor and publisher of Burning Deck Press, as well as the author or coauthor (as of 2006) of 17 books of poetry, two novels, and three books of criticism.

Reviews

[Edita · Rating 3 out of 5]

But if you try to sound feelings with words, the stone drops into reaches beyond fathoms.
*
But a mind obsessively drawn toward memory.
*
Out at the sea I stare. As if it were the universe. Could pull the infinite into my eye. Without the rational lines of perspective. With absent wavelengths represented as imagination.
[…]
Eyes breathe. Like open wounds.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't usually read poetry. It came to my attention for being awarded the Poetry book of the year by the Los Angeles Times. The book is a treat.

[Rebecca Valley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rosmarie Waldrop is a wonder.

[H]

"There is always the feeling that I never have enough information. The process is not so much 'telling' as questioning. This implies interruption. And in the gaps we might get hints of much that has to be left unsaid-- but should be thought about" (3)

"I live in shallow water/ but/ when it rains/ I inherit the land" (6)

"general amnesia the vacant breath of sky" (8)

"it would take a/ long walk through mounting sand to reach them/ I'm sure I've never known/ anything in any/ language" (10)

"I carry your name away/ from our intersection" (12)

"the always dangerous next/ dawn bleeds its sequence of ready signs" (18)

“Something that can be held in the mouth, deeply, like darkness by someone blind or the emptiness I place at the center of each poem to allow penetration” (81)

“If we don’t signal our love, reason will eat our heart out before it can admit its forms of mere intention, and we won’t know what has departed” (81)

“You were determined to get rid of your soul by expressing it completely, rubbing the silver off the mirror in hope of a new innocence of body on the other side of knowing…Everything in our universe curves back to the apple” (84)

“Is it called love or nerves, you said, when everything is on the verge of happening?” (85)

“I badly wanted a story of my own…But what if my experience were the kind of snow that does not accumulate?” (88)

“I’ve learned that life consists in fitting my body to the earth’s slow rotation…A discomfort with the feel of home before it grows into inflamed tissue and real illness” (92)

“And my body slopes toward yours no matter how level the ground…the way my sensations seem to belong to a me that has always already sided with the world” (93)

"it's possible/ the eye knows/ even where there should have been a lake" (112)

"Form is fatal, some say. Whereas an endless unborn surface. Without point...And the light goes on pretending that seeing is simple" (173)

"The body takes a long time to reassemble itself" (175)

"I am extremely interested in failure. The beginning of art lies next to the body, transitive fissure, with high waves immediately behind" (182)

"Either we don't move or much follows. The history of the universe predicated on ten seconds of initial turbulence?/ If you ask: Where did it all begin? do I answer with a cry of distress, the tip of a triangle, a plan to picnic, a sudden toothache?" (188)

"the world is hidden by significance" (198)

"Often we must work with holes. In understanding. Often we must set out without knowing where. Often we must distrust narratives. Never need struggle over the meaning of death" (202)

"All week I concentrated on the hopeless accuracy of anxiety" (204)

"Time is the invention of past snow. The thread I walk like a tightrope. The maze in the shape of a straight line" (204)

"Memories are many. Glitter in the brain, ready to be pilfered. Does this fit my image of the real?" (212)

"A violet's blue as a sign of distance" (214)

"Zero knots its shape around a void. A hole a man may fall into if he can't see straight" (222)

"To be webbed with the world I turn my back on my husband's body" (230)

"It seems outlandish that I should need legs to love Emily Dickinson. But if I can know anything at all it's because my body has made a pact with the physical world...And I write. Have made a pact with nothingness. Make love to absent bodies. And though I cannot fill the space they do not occupy their shadows stand between me and thin sky" (231)

"Contradict as needed" (231)

[Srinaath · Rating 2 out of 5]

Waldrop's signature style departs after fifty pages or so, with fleeting reappearances, leaving behind nonsensical (and somehow repetitive) prose-poetry. It's like she wanted to blue-ball her readers.

[Tania Bies · Rating 5 out of 5]

Language, like everything, is full of gaps, and the gaps contain most of the meaning x

[Jack Malik · Rating 4 out of 5]

A complex read. I think I need to revisit this after a few years. Nonetheless, Gap Gardening is one of those poetry books that challenges yr perception of “what is poetry” or “what is a poem”.