Revenants

by Mark Nowak

Mark Nowak encounters the whispers of creation and cultural remembrance in his eminent, visionary poetry. Revenants is an original return to a splendid ethos of ancestral word patterns, and the images bear the solemn pleasures of time, place, and singular landscapes.—Gerald Vizenor

This first book length collection of poetry by the editor of the journal Cross-Cultural Poetics explores the Polish American neighborhoods in and around Buffalo, New York, finding collective truths in the particularity of a unique culture.

Mark Nowak is the editor of Theodore Enslin’s selected poems, Then, and Now, and an associate professor at the College of St. Catherine in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His poems have been anthologized in An Anthology of New (American) Poets and Children of the Cold A Scrapbook .

Genres: Poetry

160 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2000

Reviews

[Laurel Perez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nowak’s strange, intelligent, and often opaque collection is the apparent fact that the motives and aims of his poetry are usually not poetic. In another sense, perhaps less easy to pinpoint, this wariness of poetry describes the shape and sounds of his lines, which are generally disjointed, difficult to parse, and obstinately unmusical: “Light with these the entrance among them, who begin to rule / my house.” The subject of the texts is Nowak’s Polish-American ancestry, its myths and odd collection of particular details; he approaches this heritage as both an insider (because born into it) and outsider (an exile incurred by education), which explains his attraction to the role of anthropologist. Nowak splices his own words into an assemblage of photographs and citations, some taken from interviews and conversations conducted among pierogi workers, others from Malinowski’s field notes, and others from graduate-school textbooks. The result is an unusual kind of work, borrowed rather than made, more collage than poem. Nowak’s poetry has provided a music, a record toward an unknown future, a book for all of us to experience, to breathe through.

[Molly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Let's look at how / our first footstep / rooms the world. (24)

Your name is like gardenias, is the color of / gardenias are. In the yard, in the backyard, if only you. (33)

Shut the thunder off like a hose. (50)

paper / shadow / wandering around (123)

[Joe Milazzo · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book may very well prove to be as influential to 21st Century poetics as Stein's TENDER BUTTONS, Stevens' HARMONIUM, Eliot's WASTELAND, and Vallejo's TRILCE (to take but a few examples) were to 20th Century poetics.