Vault: A Poem

by Kathleen Peirce

"Everyone who’s ever read Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo” knows the depth, the loss, the bewilderment, the vision and discovery one has when encountering the work of art that’s truly talismanic. This encounter lies at the heart of Kathleen Peirce’s poetics. This poetics is aware that an encounter with a piece of art, (and, perhaps, language, too) is like entering a soul itself. She might be looking at a watercolor or at a statuette, or a gilded egg—but what she sees is the mystery of time. Her eye, examining an object, travels back in time, through time, at time. Whether it is 1575 or 1705 or 2017, she sees the fires are blazing. People and animals are burning. The music flames us. The silence flames in that music. How marvelous, in our scattered, ironic, frightened age to find a poet who is unafraid to possess a larger vision, a poet who, not unlike our Modernists, almost a century ago, is unafraid to look at beauty and see the dark waters of time that this beauty survives, yes, but that ravages us, its makers." --Ilya Kaminsky

"Find here: poetry’s virtues/pleasures. Gorgeous witness. Silence muscled with qualities. Net of attentiveness rippling outward from the meeting of the seer and the seen. Kin to The Tempest: the wondrous woven of the mundane. The strength of purpose and hearkening needed to walk in beauty’s strangeness. Its sensuousness; its intimacy (especially with necessity) that supples its language. Patience of soul spun into physical brilliance. Time present and antique, interior and exterior, “feather of hair in one hand, / scissors in another, not the heart / beating but what might return over the heart.” These are the most beautiful poems I know." --Liz Waldner

68 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2017

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a long single sequence of poems, more or less constructed around an auction catalog for some really weird sculptures that seem to come out of Dresden in the 18th century. The cycle weaves together a couple kinds of poems, including those that are strictly ekphrastic with those that imagine the interiority of the figures in the sculptures, alongside reflections on Dresden during the firebombing and other adjacent texts.

It's accomplished, and Peirce writes lines that have a very distinct and appealing rhythm. But the poems themselves are a little chilly, and some of the ideas that she introduces feel a little remote here. Not a bad thing, really, just a little abstract.

[James Grinwis · Rating 3 out of 5]

A long multi-ekphrastic poem in sections. I enjoyed looking up the various pieces Peirce conjures for her book. The poet's meditations/ exhortations connected to the art (the statuette of Daphne, for instance, beautifully photographed on the cover) are chromatic pleasures.