Marvelous Things Overheard
Poems
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A vibrant and eclectic collection from a stunningly mature young poet
"The world—the time has come to say it, though the news will not be welcome to everyone—has no intention of abandoning enchantment altogether." Roberto Calasso's words in Literature and the Gods remind us that, in an age of reason, of mechanization, of alienation, of rote drudgery, we still seek out the transcendent, the marvelous. Ange Mlinko's luminous fourth collection is both a journey toward and the space of that very enchantment.
Marvelous Things Overheard takes its title from a collection of ancient rumors about the lands of the Mediterranean. Mlinko, who lived at the American University of Beirut and traveled to Greece and Cyprus, has penned poems that seesaw between the life lived in those ancient and strife-torn places, and the life imagined through its literature: from The Greek Anthology to the Mu'allaqat. Throughout, Mlinko grapples with the passage of time on two levels: her own aging (alongside the growing up of her children) and the incontrovertible evidence of millennia of human habitation.
This is an assured and revealing collection, one that readers will want to seek refuge in again and again.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mlinko's new book takes its title from a collection of ancient rumors about Mediterranean civilizations; it's a triptych of descriptions interweaving the past with the present, echoing sometimes a ruminative Elizabeth Bishop, sometimes an elegantly fractured George Oppen. From a riff on Beowulf complete with glossary to a "Cantata for Lynette Roberts," the book is strongest where Mlinko goes beyond description to assert ("A dog roughs his tongue lapping rain on cement./ A callus rises. But words? Words are the reverse of pain./ Where pain is no words are. Apollo loves words"), or question ("if I could describe it,/ I could have it? Like an ancient contest?"), or make strange ("You could truncate butterfly to butte// and still get migration and a cumin route./ But not camel./ Not emu. Not Tuareg."). Operating on the idea that "What's gone becomes our greatest marvel," Mlinko's linguistic abilities are obviously sophisticated, but describing too literally the marvels of history and mythology risks demoting language to mere conveyer, creating a sometimes awkward tension in the book: we marvel at the times and places described turning toward a search engine for more information rather than the poems describing them. Then again, perhaps this is a postmodern intention; as Robert Rauschenberg said, "My paintings are invitations to look somewhere else."
