Form from Form

by Christopher Bolin

“Was it a crater or a sinkhole?” asks a voice in one of the mysterious, wonderstruck poems in Christopher Bolin’s Form from Form, whose cadences modulate with the energies of form-making, deformation, and elusive reformation. Natural forms and forms of human manufacture, forms of absence and those of urgent desire construct and deconstruct each other in Bolin’s singular music, which blends unnerving plainness and obliqueness, the childlike and the alien.  As their sites drift from workers’ camps to city squares, isolated coasts to windswept plains, the poems in Form from Form trace a map of a fragmented ecology, dense with physical detail of altered landscapes and displaced populations. In tones of austere beauty and harsh discordance, these poems provide a “field guide to luminescent things,” a visionary fretwork of the possibilities and impossibilities of faith in the present moment. 

Genres: Poetry

94 pages, Paperback

Published September 10, 2018

Reviews

[Stephanie · Rating 2 out of 5]

My main issue with the poems is that many of them felt like walking into a movie halfway through and watching a scene with no context, which kept me from connecting with the writing. Although I can appreciate Bolin’s skill, I don’t think this poetry collection is necessarily for me.

I received a free copy through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

[Joseph Spuckler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Form from Form by Christopher Bolin is the poet's second collection of poetry. Bolin teaches writing at the College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University. He is also the author of Ascension Theory.

Kuhl House Poets releases collections in fall and it is described by the University of Iowa Press as:

This provocative series reawakens readers to a fresh consideration of the possibilities of language and feeling by publishing work that is formally and verbally inventive, adventurous work that takes its own path outside established routes of either traditions or experimental poetry.

Form From Form perfectly fits this description. The Kuhl House releases are usually more difficult poetry and usually supply several moments of revelation. Form From Form made me think from first seeing the title. It is usually form that follows function. Reading through I began to think that if form derives from form might this not be like Plato allegory?  The poet is describing form while viewing the ideal in an attempt to relay perfection in our imperfect words. Bolin's work certainly did provide several instances when he perfectly captured a moment.

The work is rich with imagery:
The viewers in the triptych shadows breaking into sequences
of expressions—

into tableaus

of arriving
a thousand years too late to save them from themselves

~Crowd Control

"Manuscript" plays heavily on the ovine. From the vellum, to the recording of the word of The Lamb, to the "smoothing the tufted pages of the beast" the path is clearly marked and followed. The poet moves from fishermen to factories and might even touch upon the uncertainty principle.  Rich in imagery and complex in form Bolin delivers an interesting adventure in words that glimpse beyond the shadows on the wall.  

[João Pinho · Rating 4 out of 5]

Via Netgalley

Form from Form it's a book of verbal gymnastics and a veiled ascension of words...

«...and this is
where pausing
illuminates the absence of the body:
which is an illumination of the ressurection
and of the ascension;
and this is the illumination of the second coming:
of the gold-leafing, smoothing the
tufted pages
of the beast.» p.15

Sentences are melted, expanded with different purposes generating a feeling of estrangement.

«and in the windows
across from them: and someone
is in the afterlife
with
someone else's god:» p.52

The shape of the word in the text shapes their meaning in the context. As if you could read the silences in between.

[Nathaniel Darkish · Rating 3 out of 5]

No single poem especially spoke to me, but the writing (especially the imagery) showed skill.