Entrepôt

by Mark McMorris

“McMorris is a poet utterly devoted to the sensual beauty of language and he crafts lines dense and strong enough to bear the crashing forces of history and identity contained within them . . . his work is wrenching, lovely, and powerfully seductive.”— Poetry Project Newsletter Within the intimate, enlightened, and dazzling linguistic flights of these poem-letters, Mark McMorris engages a world that has experienced “continuous combat since Helen gave Paris a flower / at least since the Bronze Age of Agamemnon’s armada.” Born in Jamaica, Mark McMorris has won the Contemporary Poetry Series prize and has been a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. He teaches at Georgetown University where he directs the Lannan Literary Programs.

Genres: Poetry

90 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

Reviews

[Tristan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really loved Entrepôt. The poems were energetic, exciting, powerful, and dense, sparkling with experiment while also giving lots of footholds for the reader to make sense of them. These poems were about meetings, about colonialism, about realization. They engaged history, magic, and the power of narrative freely. I read the book really quickly, which makes it hard to talk about individual poems. The whole Letters to Michael sequence is incredible and they're spread out throughout the book in a really interesting way and most of the other poems are also astonishing. I especially liked "Gadji Beri Bimba" and "Little Dog with Bananas", which were fascinating reads that took advantage of their multipart structures to create their energy.

As an example of the kind of linguistic brilliance of the poems here is an excerpt from "Dear Michael (3)":

These are old questions I have long explored
you will say, and call down the circling hawk,
and greet me with a referral, I hope, to texts
that Galileo wrote in Galilee, on the sea of salt.
Say then that I have read these texts
the Dead Sea has no salt, and Galileo is dead

Highly recommended for all readers. I look forward to hopefully returning to this and spending more time with it.

[Bella Moses · Rating 4 out of 5]

Blow ur head off good!!