Cahiers de Corey

Friday, November 04, 2005

Last night I read part of John Kinsella's new book, The New Arcadia; he's probably the highest-profile poet writing and thinking about pastoral right now. Though the poems are for the most part fierce anti-pastorals, laments for the agricultural abuse of nature and the landscape in Western Australia; at the same time there's pleasure in the precision and strangeness of his descriptions. The poems are crammed with Australian words that create an aura of strangeness and exoticism for this American reader, yet that's hardly Kinsella's intention: in his work the exotic is in tension with unsparing precision and accuracy. His lines are thorny, unlovely, crammed with vernacular anger. The book is written in five "acts," each bookended by a "Reflector" (a long poem describing the same cross-country drive at different times; you can read the first one here) and an "eclogue," a dialogue between quasi-iconic figures like "Younger Brother" and "Elder Brother," "Groom" and "Bride," "Woman" and "Poltergeist". His engagement with pastoral is more urgently connected with environmental questions and the particular persons and places of Australia than the more self-consciously literary pastoral that I've concerned myself with. Though his title tells us that Kinsella is hardly unaware of the legacy of pastoral poetry, he wants to implode the genre, to wake us up from a sentimental attachment to spectacles of nature and farmers that obscure the lasting and irrevocable damage we're doing to real plants, animals, and people. The latent utopianism of the genre, its revolutionary potential, only appears in flickers and kernels: Kinsella seems more concerned with making us feel the sharp edges of an uncomfortable reality: "Theft is history, metaphor / assimilation" (the dialectical ambiguity of that line break is breathtaking). When I finish reading the book I might have more to say about it.

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“Joshua Corey has reinvented the good old-fashioned American avant-garde epic poem (Whitman, Stein, Crane, O’Hara) and thrust it, kicking if not screaming, into the early 21st century, ‘rescued / by what survives the will to survive.’ The result is thrilling, and unlike any poetry I know.”

—John Ashbery

"Joshua Corey’s The Barons is a sprawling collection of poems intent on toeing the line between the profound and the glib, brainy deconstruction and guttural implosion. These poems are like toys cranked up to the point of breaking or like hurricanes whipped into speed and spinning furiously in place."

—Joe Hall, Colorado Review

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Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy is a darkly glamorous existential noir in the late modernist tradition of José Saramago, W.G. Sebald, Italo Calvino, and Roberto Bolaño. Written in gorgeous and elliptical prose, this electric first novel is a love story, a ghost story, and a psychological thriller about the enigma of American innocence, the fatality of storytelling, and the precarious destiny of reading itself.

"Corey’s prose registers the sensations, perceptions, and experiences of the novel’s characters — primarily the protagonist — in truly the only way such characters actually come to life: they live in language, and to that end the writing in Beautiful Soul, in its scrupulous attention to phrase and image in almost every sentence, could be called an attempt to bring the characters and their milieu to life through the vigor of the words on the page."

--Daniel Green, Full Stop

"We hold a letter, its creases worn nearly through from years of opening and folding shut again. Yet each reading is a revelation, a shock, a mystery, a challenge. Corey gives this a new jolt, a new charge, in this rich and intensely self-reflective novel."

--Spencer Dew, decomP

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One of the Academy of American Poets' Notable Books for 2011.

"Joshua Corey's book of sonnets is formally playful and emotionally raw, with an intensity of expression that is at times harrowing. . . . [A]n extraordinary volume." —Paul Hoover

"These songs shuttle between a past and a future, cast adrift or severed from a violent, ashen present into a necessary untimeliness. . . . What then of the sonnet, repository of desire and enemy of time? It is, as ever, that form by which we re-imagine subjectivity to confront altered circumstances, and to assess 'the shipwreck of the singular' in the maelstrom of the many. . . ." —Michael Palmer

"In Severance Songs, Joshua Corey tends to the always-mysterious border that connects the interior and the exterior. Is one inside the tale if one alludes to it? Is the eye tethered as witness to what it sees? And who can avoid singing these 'culpability cantos'? Yet if the lush Eden of intimacy foresees our later expulsion, this poet shows us how to stand at the garden's threshold where 'reaching builds on reaching.' Corey risks the possible emptiness inherent in rupture to seek out the ways we are 'knotted to one another's possibilities.' The architecture of the poem, he reveals, is replete with doors and windows and it is for us to discover whether we are looking in or looking out." —Elizabeth Robinson

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Read reviews at Publishers Weekly, Wave Composition, The Critical Flame, TrainBust, Poetry Northwest, and in Spoon River Poetry Review.

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Joshua's bookshelf: currently-reading

Swann's Way

by Marcel Proust

Slowly, slowly sinking into the astonishingly sensual memory-world of Proust. At forty, I think I'm finally old enough to appreciate it. Reading the Moncrief but I'd like to check out the Lydia Davis translation as well.

tagged: currently-reading