Library Of—

by Dan Beachy-Quick

The artist Roni Horn’s permanent installation in Iceland, Library of Water, consists of floor-to-ceiling cylinders filled with water—melted ice from all of Iceland’s twenty-four glaciers. These poems are inspired by this simultaneous act of attention to crisis and preservation against it. The “library” of these poems imagines each letter of the alphabet as its own peculiar archive, part deeply personal, part radically in common. Each poem seeks to catalog a set of associations embedded in the memories, experiences, and curious resonances each letter evokes. The urgency underlying the project—not exactly ecological, but not exactly not—lurks in that vague but omnipresent sense of oblivion’s inevitability. This is tied to the ancient Greek sense of ἀλήθεια, truth as that which shines out of actual being, and the λήθη hidden in that same word, that oblivion, that forgetting—that melting away as of ice into water and water into air—that abides in what truth we know.

58 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2021