Shore Ordered Ocean

by Dora Malech

By turns playful and serious, the poems in Dora Malech's long-awaited second collection, Shore Ordered Ocean, revel in the inherent tensions and pleasures of sense, sound and syntax, reveal the resonance in the offhand utterance, seek the unexpected in aphorism and clich, and tap into the paradoxical freedom of formality. This is an extraordinary collection of highly idiosyncratic poems that explore place, politics, the body, love, art, and more.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Dora Malech is the author of four collections of poetry: Flourish (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2020), Stet (Princeton University Press, 2018), Say So (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011), and Shore Ordered Ocean (The Waywiser Press, 2009). She lives in Baltimore, where she is an assistant professor in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like several thirty-something poets presently working under the urbane register of James Merrill -- James Arthur and Peter Streckfus come to mind -- Dora Malech has terrific speed in her non sequiturs, which seem to be explaining themselves to you while you're still summoning the polite facial expression of puzzlement. "The Up-and-Up" starts this way: "There is infinite precedent | for the perversion of clemency. | I have held the envelope up to the light." If you don't enjoy effortless talk, don't come round here, it says, and talk the poems do, garrulously strumming their lyric wire. The wire is metonymy, with which Malech has a superb technique, and the style she makes of "Coughed and called what bled the quick. | One kick, one trick, one act, one hit," is a kind of desperate information -- who knows but that it doesn't take its urgency from our over-developed military technology which leaves non-combatants and technicians themselves perilously exposed.

Shore-Ordered Ocean comes from England, by Waywiser Press (another Malech volume, from Cleveland State, will appear later this year), and there are problems with it connected to Malech's urgency to get the style to "stick" (the poem I'm just quoting from is called "Push, Pull"), but it is also an astonishment in its resistance to such stickiness: "All stigmas ripen to receive, | seasons of fruit each after its kind means here the bruised apple | of a bruised eye, here dear unshod mama and her sloshing seahorse." The urgency in the last half-line's over-stressed trochees turning the ground for "and her sloshing seahorse" suggests some of the linguistic dynamism.

Does it say what it sounds like? A good test case is two poems in the back of the book, "A Way," and "Core Despondence," -- that they are both in the book (next to each other no less) strikes me as a mistake, as both meditate on oceans; both are about romantic longing; in other words, what they say seems strikingly the same. However they sound completely different within the range of this writer's style. The first begins "Without you I am making up an ocean," and is a lyric of desire; the second, "Dear luminous occlusion, | my numen - a question. || What to do with all this ocean?" In the former, Malech's basic metonymic technique is modified somewhat, so that lines of the informatic-demotic, like "Any resemblance to real oceans living or dead | is purely coincidental," structurally offset the substitutions within the lines, suggesting that the ocean meditated upon is both signal-backdrop as well as a endlessly re-written contract between distanced lovers. But in the latter poem, after the already-quoted rhetorical question ("What to do with all this ocean?"), we're back to the basic metonymy of "Mussels in a dream mean | minor gains, nothing to | keep my eyes on low tide for." Substitutions and compression in both cases, but the second kind of metonymy is built for speed, desperate again for the speed to have gotten us somewhere. What was the acceleration for? I can't tell if the love in the background has changed or if it's simply something upon which the voice is trying to catch.

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read these poems because she was on the Dylan Thomas Prize longlist for 2010. She clearly loves words (possibly the understatement of the year) but I found the spinning of grammar to be hard to read and some of the word choices turning a poem that started as an interesting thought into something a bit nonsensical.

[Alex Turner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great project. Interesting language.