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Wavetable
Poetry. Michael Ives' witty, powerful and challenging poems have been anthologized in numerous American journals and magazines. His work has the unmistakable quality of a true poet at work; Wavetable is his finest collection so far.
Some poets respond to the world as they find it; others collect its materials and compose syntactical mindscapes of exact and exacting cognitive 'form within flow as of liquid thought.' Michael Ives is a maker of such worlds. WAVETABLE, his new collection, figures discrete arcs which flare, alter, and condense, like vagrant spirits, or particles that materialize as language. This now is our habitat, charged with ravishing, mutable wonders on the brink of catastrophe, or 'Rippling with scenes of godbirth/and unendurable ecstasy.'--Ann Lauterbach
Every sentence leaves us with something we've never known before, some new giving from the mind embodied in words. His syntax is a house on fire, and like flames his words are hungry and quick, and leave nothing the same after they pass.--Robert Kelly
Some poets respond to the world as they find it; others collect its materials and compose syntactical mindscapes of exact and exacting cognitive 'form within flow as of liquid thought.' Michael Ives is a maker of such worlds. WAVETABLE, his new collection, figures discrete arcs which flare, alter, and condense, like vagrant spirits, or particles that materialize as language. This now is our habitat, charged with ravishing, mutable wonders on the brink of catastrophe, or 'Rippling with scenes of godbirth/and unendurable ecstasy.'--Ann Lauterbach
Every sentence leaves us with something we've never known before, some new giving from the mind embodied in words. His syntax is a house on fire, and like flames his words are hungry and quick, and leave nothing the same after they pass.--Robert Kelly
114 pages, Paperback
Published April 24, 2015
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January 10, 2022
Has to be one of the most interesting poets writing today. Diaphanously inscrutable; poems like gnostic shards of the divine. Every poem revels in paradox and absolute plurality of meaning. At times effacing and caustic to the language and things of our tawdry modern world, at times deeply affirmative of the exact nature of Things as They Are. Though they may seem arcane and even evasive, these poems are not mere intellectual and syntactic pyrotechnics, they are living organisms who in their idiosyncratic phototaxes reach for peculiar and urgent graces.
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