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The Orphan and Its Relations
This collection of poems by Elizabeth Robinson circles around and around the place of the individual in relation to an other or Other or others. If human experience is nested in relation, "the braid of bodies that engendered this self," it is also disrupted by "an intimacy that can disassemble and recreate itself" until an uneasy form of empathy emerges from the radical isolation of human
"I would be you, the self at a loss. The invisible hand that rests on the shoulder
"of its own body, guiding it. We do not know what comfort is."
Using prose poems to suggest the narrative logic of the story, The Orphan and Its Relations takes references from domestic life, myth and folktales, and artworks "to bridge," as Robert Creeley said elsewhere of Robinson's work, "between the physically given world and that other we gloss with words, yet apprehend insistently as the defining presence of our lives themselves."
"I would be you, the self at a loss. The invisible hand that rests on the shoulder
"of its own body, guiding it. We do not know what comfort is."
Using prose poems to suggest the narrative logic of the story, The Orphan and Its Relations takes references from domestic life, myth and folktales, and artworks "to bridge," as Robert Creeley said elsewhere of Robinson's work, "between the physically given world and that other we gloss with words, yet apprehend insistently as the defining presence of our lives themselves."
- GenresPoetry
First published November 1, 2008
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About the author
Elizabeth Robinson
91 books75 followersElizabeth Robinson was educated at Bard College, Brown University, and Pacific School of Religion. She currently lives in Boulder, Colorado. With Colleen Lookingbill, she co-edits EtherDome Press. She co-edits Instance Press with Laura Sims and Beth Anderson.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
May 25, 2021
I don't know how to describe this one. Condensed fairy tales and fables, surrealist visions and daydreams. A book I finished and instantly wanted to read again.
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April 17, 2009Full disclosure: Elizabeth and I bonded initially over shared academic strife. Over time she's become one of the reasons Kass (Fleisher) and I look forward to our summer sojourns in Boulder.
The Orphan & Its Relations would have its readers understand themselves as orphaned -- which most of us become, in a sense, past a certain point in our lives -- hence as those whose "relation" to the bereft, with which adjectival noun one might well find oneself in emotional proximity, necessarily predicates a felt loss. As such there's something of a subjective doubling at work throughout, as suggested by the "place right under your nose" (ha), where we find a "seam" that "proves that things join in the middle." This "middle" semantic ground, just above or below the surface of the text, is where flesh is made Robinson's word. At times distinctively Christian-iconographic (witty too, with "cannibal," for instance, a play on Cain and Abel, and another doubling), her spiritual meditation in prose produces successive iterations of "I" and "you" -- second person, as is customary, allowing for direct address to the reader -- along with the occasional appearance of a third person -- "he," "she," and that curious and irregular substitute for the first person, "one." "How does one escape? / By self-division." Interesting, as well, is the gendering at work here, delicately rendered: "She could be two persons at one time, as in a person's mother and a person's lover. / But he could not be multiple." God here is an entity or presence mediated for most by "church marquees," but whose divine fact is perhaps best captured in the loss of speech apropos of loss itself: "She gulps, and the gap in her throat distends for good." "She covers her mouth before she coughs up sound." If "From inside your mouth" might come a précis of the divine, we can't be sure whether such evidence is simply of things unseen: "'Nothing in this world is random. Design proves its own destiny.'"
Where the poet-narrator seems most at home, though, is when she's literally at home, eavesdropping on the discourse and work of men -- "The man begins to sing a song" -- or thinking about "you," even "imagin(ing) that I am you." I've already spoiled the punch line (the bit about design and destiny) to this latter poem or piece or movement, "Crow and Robin," my favorite of the volume. Or if I haven't, I will now: "If I dared, your voice would sing." The conditional -- here, with a touch of subjunctive yearning -- speaks less to unrequited desire (of any sort) than to human frailty in a world where (as we learn earlier) "Only the pain is real." And so, in the last piece, "Chalk" -- another favorite, and a "wry, ironic" treatment of the elegiac mode (note the titular nod to ephemeral mediation/materiality) -- "nouns might supplant" the "subject," who or which can, via a sort of lyrical transubstantiation, stand in for "justice, or justice overturned," or (most pointedly) "creator of the bereaved." God may have died, but lives on, paradoxically, in his paradoxes. If the "asphyxia" that emerges here portends a renewed "vision of the divine," it's fraught with signs. We arrive at heaven's gate gesturing, voiceless, full of words. Including, of course, that word that "sometime meant something specific": Abracadabra.
The Orphan & Its Relations would have its readers understand themselves as orphaned -- which most of us become, in a sense, past a certain point in our lives -- hence as those whose "relation" to the bereft, with which adjectival noun one might well find oneself in emotional proximity, necessarily predicates a felt loss. As such there's something of a subjective doubling at work throughout, as suggested by the "place right under your nose" (ha), where we find a "seam" that "proves that things join in the middle." This "middle" semantic ground, just above or below the surface of the text, is where flesh is made Robinson's word. At times distinctively Christian-iconographic (witty too, with "cannibal," for instance, a play on Cain and Abel, and another doubling), her spiritual meditation in prose produces successive iterations of "I" and "you" -- second person, as is customary, allowing for direct address to the reader -- along with the occasional appearance of a third person -- "he," "she," and that curious and irregular substitute for the first person, "one." "How does one escape? / By self-division." Interesting, as well, is the gendering at work here, delicately rendered: "She could be two persons at one time, as in a person's mother and a person's lover. / But he could not be multiple." God here is an entity or presence mediated for most by "church marquees," but whose divine fact is perhaps best captured in the loss of speech apropos of loss itself: "She gulps, and the gap in her throat distends for good." "She covers her mouth before she coughs up sound." If "From inside your mouth" might come a précis of the divine, we can't be sure whether such evidence is simply of things unseen: "'Nothing in this world is random. Design proves its own destiny.'"
Where the poet-narrator seems most at home, though, is when she's literally at home, eavesdropping on the discourse and work of men -- "The man begins to sing a song" -- or thinking about "you," even "imagin(ing) that I am you." I've already spoiled the punch line (the bit about design and destiny) to this latter poem or piece or movement, "Crow and Robin," my favorite of the volume. Or if I haven't, I will now: "If I dared, your voice would sing." The conditional -- here, with a touch of subjunctive yearning -- speaks less to unrequited desire (of any sort) than to human frailty in a world where (as we learn earlier) "Only the pain is real." And so, in the last piece, "Chalk" -- another favorite, and a "wry, ironic" treatment of the elegiac mode (note the titular nod to ephemeral mediation/materiality) -- "nouns might supplant" the "subject," who or which can, via a sort of lyrical transubstantiation, stand in for "justice, or justice overturned," or (most pointedly) "creator of the bereaved." God may have died, but lives on, paradoxically, in his paradoxes. If the "asphyxia" that emerges here portends a renewed "vision of the divine," it's fraught with signs. We arrive at heaven's gate gesturing, voiceless, full of words. Including, of course, that word that "sometime meant something specific": Abracadabra.
December 2, 2011
How do I write about Elizabeth Robinson’s poems? As with Alice Notley’s recent books, I have hidden my partial and insubstantial thoughts in notebooks for an imagined future essay. The magnitude of my gratitude prevents me from writing a small laughable review here, even a lyrical send up. I read Robinson’s books over and over to inexhaustable pleasure and discovery. Her words present intense musical and metaphysical systems. Each book varies in style and approach but never in vision. I’m endlessly grateful.
January 19, 2009
amazing work again from Elza Rob. These prose poems not only breathe, but think as well.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews