Dark Sky Question

by Larissa Szporluk

As Brenda Hillman notes in her Introduction, Larissa Szporluk "creates an animate new universe out of cryptic original speech" in these poems. Exploring how the mind orders experience—and how disorder, or different orders, affect that experience—Szporluk has produced a poetry of alien beauty, limning worlds where the inability to exert control results in a disturbing, overwhelming immediacy.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 28, 1998

About the author

Larissa Szporluk was raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan and earned degrees at the University of Michigan, the University of California-Berkeley, and the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns fellow. Her books of poetry include Dark Sky Question (1998), which won the Barnard Poetry Prize; Isolato (2000), winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize; The Wind, Master Cherry, the Wind (2003); Embryos and Idiots (2007); and Traffic with Macbeth (2011). She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and currently teaches at Bowling Green State University.

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is a raw energy and wild, dangerous imagination inside this book. and while it is sometimes unclear what is going on - the reader sees that there is a logic that holds together where Larissa takes us. she challenges the reader to figure it out - it is far from simple poetry - and I can see that some may shy away from it.

I think it's brilliant, though.

[Gary McDowell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Larissa rocks so hard.

[Justin Goodman · Rating 3 out of 5]

In Brenda Hillman's introduction, there's one sentence that strikes the perfect measure of Dark Sky Questions: "An epistemology is always the erotic slave to method." I say it's the perfect measure because it perfectly captures how Szporluk embraces and inverts the metaphysical tradition. Hillman describes it as "less from the metaphysical poets than from a kind of force field that moves between the romantic and the early modernist traditions, arriving, after a dark fertile Coleridgean thrashing, at a muted postmodernism" - which works, although I can't help but think of Abelard & Heloise's love letters. It's a yawning gap between intimacy and contact in Szporluk's poetry that one imagines how aliens might feel, having spent so many generations searching for earth that they can't even remember having sent the Wow signal, finding earth is nothing more than the subsonic echoes of an ecological collapse.

Unfortunately I felt that the high-tension act of making her poems (as she writes in "Ignis Fatuus") "big and not great" such that "part of the sky is all of the sky./The rest is wasted" often turned less into transgressive statements against modes of human life/ideation and more into broader-brimmed ideas like "sin" - as in "The Grass and the Sin" which ends "If Noah's water never came, who would know how bad the land had been...." The poem ends with an ellipses, lending it a meditative incompleteness, but it came across to me as an uninteresting way to think about the mythology of the flood, let alone about any mythology whatsoever.

And this is what "an epistemology is always the erotic slave to method" means to me. At her best, Szporluk depicts entities as bearers solely of themselves which get wrapped up in a network of significations that are semi-directly teased out. This is almost exactly what she implies in an interview with The Journal where she says, explaining the grim origin of another poem, "I suppose the image surpasses myth by the fact of being real. And, being real, the image has no agenda other than to have happened." Which is the great horror of the "part of the sky being all of the sky" and "all these birds without birdness," as ("Biology of Heaven"). There's a kind of rarefied terror in the destruction of humanity - both metaphysically and literally, as is obvious in "The Corals." I would say a fascinating book that does an equivalent thing to "the human" is CM Koseman's All Tomorrows.

[Matt McBride · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book establishes Szporluk's idiom as well as the themes that run through her work but is also notable in some of the ways it differs. Most notably was her explorations of the act of creation and the relationship of the creator to what they've made. Gnostic, fable-like, surrealistic, and menacing, this is a stunning debut collection.

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not quite narrative, definately not myth, and not purely lyrical - and wholly worth the $15.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

when i don't know where to begin, i read this book.

[Brian Morrison · Rating 5 out of 5]

lots and lots about women. maybe.

[Jennifer · Rating 2 out of 5]

A few gems in this collection, but overall, not so gem-like.