Anne Blonstein: memory's morning
Published 15 April 2008
Paperback, 88pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700769
A musical phrase, a dream image, the absence of a lover, fragments of conversation with friends, an atrocity, the fragility and infinite mutability of words . . . each of the 71 poems in this collection proliferates around its transient nucleus. Like cells in a body, they are dynamic repositories of the past, sites for the breakdown and synthesis of experience, receptors and translators of self-generated and external messages. The immediate setting of the poems is Europe, a continent of many languages, whose borders can be porous or impenetrable depending on who wants to cross them. A truly heterogeneous space, whose land- and mindscapes remain deeply scarred — but also nourished — by the events and concepts of not only the twentieth century.
Although the poems in this book written over a period of four years are distinguished by annually changing forms, they have been arranged not chronologically but calendrically.
Comments on Anne Blonstein's previous publications:
"Blonstein calls attention not so much to the decaying artifacts of
western culture and their transformation in time, but rather to the repetitive
translation of those artifacts from epoch to epoch, their uniqueness, the
different effects they have within each temporal location. For Blonstein,
as with G. Stein's rose, each object is unique, singular, unrepeatable."
Marina Camboni reviewing from eternity to personal pronoun
"though the poems touch on overt politics only a few
times, one understands that every unorthodox use of grammar and image asks
us to rethink our comfortable and clichéd schemas. The book combines
this questioning of the dominant paradigm, characteristic of 'language poets',
with a desire to create a real, sensual world for the reader.
Sarah Hudgens reviewing that those lips had language
Download a sampler PDF of work from this book here
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