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ISBN: 188202226-2
TITLE: Close to me & Closer...
.............(The Language of Heaven) and Desamere
AUTHOR: Alice Notley
$10.50
Excerpt
DESCRIPTION: 1995, 144 pages.
Alice Notley’s two books, Close to me & Closer... and Desamere, are works that are wholly their art, meaning they occur as their language shape measure. She’s invented a measure. The text is a rich current crossing, as at the moment of imagining, into being in death and in an expanded life. Notley transgresses conventional contemporary categories of genre; rather than genre, the form of the writing is the mind’s inner sense and motion.
"Alice Notley is, I think, the most challenging and engaging of our contemporary radical female poets...infused with uncommon verbal originality, intelligence and joyous playfullness, full of heart, intensity and wonder, provocatively addressing forever unsolved questions of form and identity, life and death, imagination and gender, Notley’s poems are unsettling and inspiring."
San Francisco Chronicle
Notley’s enjambments give a wink to straitlaced syntax, and thus convey the rush and ragged edges of actual talk, the "sheets of thoughts" the mind billows through. Drawn in by her conversational, if not confessional pitch– "May I never be afraid; especially of myself" –we are hardly prepared for the wrench she throws."
The Village Voice
We don’t ever know how or who
Those are
ideas of
the living...They’re just
ideas... Change your
way of talking
Dream a little:
there is a motor
that doesn’t stop or start
It’s empty
to look at It’s an
empty
inside-of-a-box
Why not?
It’s what...
there only is
...my motor.
It’s real.
This poem is a...dream
I’m dreaming of...being
a live man...
Riding...in the car...
through a town I
won’t name yet...You
go down...into a
valley...Trees there not
high ones...a stream I
guess...In this dream the...
vegetation...is soft
& thick – softer & thicker
than it was...there is...
an...outline...a
line of light...somewhere...
Because there is...a lot
of darkness...down there...
This...is a poem...because
the landscape...is both...
the same & different than...
it was...And now I’ll name
the town: Valentine,
Arizona...This poem means...
The dead still...love
the world...But they get...
to have...it different.
Copyright © 2002 O Books
