Personal Volcano

by Laura Moriarty

Personal Volcano explores the history of volcano-related catastrophes worldwide, meditating on ecopoetics and climate catastrophes to come. Volcanoes have caused famines, even extinction — yet, in the context of geologic time, much like human beings, they take up barely a moment.

Praise

Laura Moriarty has unique wit and humor—and perhaps the most perceptive engagement with words that anyone’s had for years.
-ROBERT CREELEY

Take Laura’s Geologics as aid and guide on our present slog through the dark wood.

-CLARK COOLRIDGE

Moriarty’s sweeping volcanology spews forth a history of the scientific, intellectual, and popular imagination of the (extra)terrestrial crustal phenomenon. Invoking the Romantics, but with a Modernist-feminist slant akin to Dickinson’s or Moore’s, Moriarty witnesses the volcano, along with what happens to it (and not to mention all the earth) when held by the imperial gaze; from oil wells to nuclear bombs, technologies of our extraction economy gush and explode. “But where are we in all this stone?” the petropoet asks. In response to her own question, and in a gesture that turns the Romantic sublime on its head, Moriarty crystallizes how in the aftermath of human cruelty and love, after historical time itself, it is the volcano that will erupt again, amid so much other vibrant, shuddering matter.
-ANGELA HUME

Genres: Poetry

136 pages, Paperback

Published May 1, 2019

About the author

There is more than one author with this name

Laura Moriarty’s books include A Tonalist an essay poem from Nightboat Books, the novels, Cunning and Ultravioleta. A Semblance: Selected and New Poems, 1975 – 2007 came out from Omnidawn in 2007. Who That Divines is forthcoming from Nightboat Books. She is the author of ten other books of poetry going back to 1980. She won the Poetry Center Book Award in 1983, a Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Award in Poetry in 1992, a New Langton Arts Award in Literature 1998 and a Fund for Poetry grant in 2007. She has taught at Mills College and Naropa University, among other places, and is Deputy Director of Small Press Distribution. For more, see the blog A Tonalist Notes.

Photo by Marc Lecard.

Reviews

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

What does anyone really know about a volcano? I mean there's what we know because as children we're taught about the existence of volcanoes. But what are those volcanoes except some distant geological fact removed from our immediate concerns? They're like myths. They're hyperbolic and intriguing. And, for my reading, Moriarty's Personal Volcano takes that general understanding of "the volcano," and she kneads it. She forces further understanding from what we generally know, by kneading in what she has learned through research and eyewitness accounts.

This partly explains the "personal" in the title. Moriarty as civilian scientist, as poet tying together history, geology, and intense curiosity. But there is more to her "personal," because the book is an extended poetic consideration of volcanoes. How can volcanoes be used to explain people, the various personality traits that might result from someone exploding, what it might mean to describe someone as a "dormant volcano." I find this analogical work interesting, especially because it feels like just one facet of her overall fascination with volcanoes. It's woven in both subtly and explicitly.

But perhaps what I appreciate most is how the language around volcanoes is so assiduously developed, so that by the time she compares capitalism to volcanic activity in "Section 9. Analogic Geology," I feel the full weight of her critique on capitalism. The devastation brought by the ambivalence of 20th Century industrialists who exploited resources and negligently left them to keep poisoning the environment. It's a true feat of poetic structure!

[Coki · Rating 2 out of 5]

En mix mellan autobiografi, poesi, prosapoesi. En del texter à la stream of consciousness. Intressant tema kring vulkaner, personliga och geologiska, men texten är tung och pratig, formatet gör den svår-penetrerad. Läste som del av kurs.

[Abi · Rating 4 out of 5]

🌋

[Zoe Tuck · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading Laura Moriarty’s Personal Volcano (Nightboat Books), readers will quickly come to understand personal expansively. While Moriarty does weave autobiography into the semantic net which she draws around volcanoes, I understand personal in this work to mean individual, particular. Over the course of the poems, readers discover that Moriarty lives in a particular time (our era, in which the Anthropocene has succeeded the Holocene), a particular place (the East Bay in California, eastern edge of the Pacific Rim) from which she travels to other particular places. And certainly the path she charts of volcanoes as literary subject, symbol, or trope is marked by personal tastes (Jules Verne, for one).

Read the rest at The Adroit Journal!