💥 Explore this must-read post from Culture | The Guardian 📖
📂 **Category**: Poetry,Books,Culture
📌 **What You’ll Learn**:
Gravity Archives by Andrew Motion; Rabbitbox by Wayne Holloway Smith; Strange Buildings by J.L. Williams; I Know Some Things by Richard Sicken
The Gravity Archives by Andrew Motion (Faber, £12.99)
From his 1978 debut to his award-winning elegies for Princess Diana and the Queen Mother, death has been Motion’s central preoccupation. And for good reason: his mother’s accidental fall from the horse and subsequent premature death catalyzed an unflinching elegiac pattern, in which the poet was a chronicler of loss—and by extension, love. But something has subtly changed in this latest shift in gravity. No longer the bewildered and contradictory Englishman who immigrated to the United States in his previous book, Randomly Moving Particles, we see here a more grounded and determined eye examining the deaths of others as well as his own. An opening series of eight almost sonnet-like poems mourning Baltimore poet Joseph Harrison contrasts the American’s dying courage with the English poet’s reserve. “You talk. I’ll do it—but I warn you, Joe, / Talking isn’t my first nature. I blame my father, / His silence is unfathomable. I’ve tried.” Embarrassment puts sadness back in its own place, making room for alternatives that are sometimes hopeful or downright funny. In “Outum Light,” a sequence of familial deaths begins “Andrew Motion is dead, too… He was a fool in his own mind,” mixing pathos and doomsday. In English Elegies, John Berryman appears as a spiritual guide “in a dazzling drunken state,” advising against the melancholy attraction of home. “This place is finished for Englandetc., / said John. Wisely, Motion decides: “The time has come / I, like everyone else, plan to die alone.”
Rabbitbox by Wayne Holloway Smith (Scribner, £12.99)
The “poisonous grammar” of the house mediates a variant of the filial elegy in Rabbitbox, where male violence terrorizes the boy, or “boy-rabbit.” Here we mourn not for the dead, but for those who are prevented from living: a young mother and her child trapped by a mysterious husband and father. “Once the mother locked herself unable / Behind the door of the downstairs toilet / to escape the rage that swept through her / And the mind remembers the cold dinner on the table.” In nine unnumbered sections, we understand that for Holloway-Smith the recollection of reason is a fragmented recollection by “a narrator who does not want to look his story straight in the eye.” Inspired in part by Joseph Pintauro’s 1970s mystery children’s book, The Rabbit Box, the boy-like-rabbit is a kind of trickster searching for safety and love. It is also a shadow puppet projected onto the wall, a two-dimensional illusion of hands. The boy hides in the wardrobe, escaping only through a broken fairy tale, the haunting song of his mother “who has known him all his life.” This devastating book, sharp with skillfully crafted language, is an ambitious leap into lyricism that conceals.
Continue reading…
⚡ **What’s your take?**
Share your thoughts in the comments below!
#️⃣ **#Modern #Poems #Review #Report**
🕒 **Posted on**: 1772843481
🌟 **Want more?** Click here for more info! 🌟
