Area

by Marcella Durand

Poetry. "A wonderful book of presence where sentences point to new directions of meaning among planets, colors, mechanics, botanic and language itself. A new configuration of feelings and knowledge exposed in the most renewed poetical process of sensing life as it flows. A brilliant book about a new location for our notion of space and time"--Nicole Brossard.

Genres: Poetry

90 pages, paperback

First published April 1, 2008

Reviews

[Ellie Botoman · Rating 4 out of 5]

“but then what / is oil? but millions / of creatures crushed / one into another / shoulder / to shoulder”

[Evan Pincus · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Verneuil Process, “on a distant mesa, surrounded by desert” and (especially) The Anatomy of Oil are good poems (the latter might even be very good), but with the rest, as I admit is the case with a lot of poetry I read, I am more enthused by the conceptual connections thought through and the images presented or dissected than I am the actual use of language. This poet is a translator of oulipian geology, and if you know me, I’m sure you know that’s about as up my alley as it gets (I’ve written poems no you can’t read them not all that dissimilar to some of the ones here), and these are certainly poems that reflect those interests in compelling ways, but in many cases I would ask myself why a line was broken up the way it was or why the words were in a particular idiosyncratic order and, without further information as to the way the text was constructed, the only answer I could really come up with to explain it was “well, it comes across as more poem-like that way” - perhaps that’s bad faith on my part, but in any case, I wouldn’t quite call it always satisfying.