Shearsman Books

Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611177

Download a PDF sampler from this book.

Monochromatic kaleidoscope of winter. Limited components revolving, generating a shifting mosaic that replicates the passage of the winter days themselves. A modeling of time, its observable passage through the observations of weather, interior and exterior. Seasons, shifting in microns, are the recurring vocabulary of time itself. This limited vocabulary, the vocabulary of nearly identical instants, forms the center of time's concealed circularity. To make this available in language requires a particular patience of attention. There are few elements on the face of the traditional watch—the action is circular and repetitive. The elements of late winter—what we can perceive—do perceive—arrive, if closely observed, on a sparsely adorned cylinder. There is a mathematics to the passage of time—a sense of odds—percentages—chances— intrinsic in time's forward motion. Things revealed and then revealed again in different contexts, surroundings, hues. If you attend to it closely, you may notice that time has a paradoxical simultaneity, which is to say, in consciousness, time does not move simply forward, it occurs alongside itself, with itself. Yet, how can this strange, wondrous circularity be expressed on the page—where word must follow word—the project of the poem may be to arrange a paradox we live beside in such a way that we can enter it, inhabit it, view it intentionally, from the inside.

"Like all magnificent poets, Maryrose Larkin sheds new light on commonly overlooked particulars: a dictionary, weather reports, 'the tongue flowering.' Between 'theories and waking life' she reveals a vantage beyond duality, where all words contain their opposites and the division between inner and outer is fluid. Larkin's page is an everchanging surface or layered 'lung sky scalloped.' In her work the found is made intimate, and this stirring, exacting book seems to breathe along with the reader." —Laynie Browne

"In these poems, Maryrose Larkin delicately researches the threshold(s) between winter and spring. Fleeting, returning, these poems are cumulative so that finally one can speak of a liminal landscape. Yes, but 'see also' or 'elsewhere.' 'what it teaches at random' So doubt, chance enter the work as guides to the transitory. It's about language: a recurring vocabulary: archaic and ached and never and suggests and words for words, parts of speech, parts of the body's speech, as if the poem were one's doppelganger: 'a riotous primer/ where a and be are constants'

The arbitrary and whimsical measuring of spring's advance or retreat:

'winter is the 50% change cinders 50% starling face and rage eye bare chance mapped as change…'

Shape/shifter: a poem that catalogs the changes:

and in again
and shadow throat
and line life
and mission to
and chain link fence
and cinder faced
and gone again

Finally:

I'll be the 50% chance." —Beverley Dahlen

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