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ISBN: 1-882022-31-9
TITLE: Homing Devices
AUTHOR: Liz Waldner
$9.00
Exerpts
This alphabet is very small again; are there enough letters to spell my way to you?
– Liz Waldner
DESCRIPTION: 83 pages
A homing device is meant to lead us back to where we came from. The poems in Liz Waldner’s Homing Devices seek to perform that function, tracing the meanders of a road leading back from the present to somewhere she never arrives, slipping from a beginning through a middle with no end in sight.
The book unfolds in the shadow of Dante, whose voice is heard in a quote that runs like a thread through the work: "Midway through this life’s journey, I found myself in a dark wood, the right way lost." The poems that make up this imaginative collection are laced with frequent allusions to many such wanderers, fugitives from high and low culture trying to find their way home. We cross Orpheus and Euridice, Hansel and Gretel, and Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. We hear echoes of the lost souls in Lou Reed’s "Take A Walk on The Wild Side," the people that come and go in Eno’s "Some of Them Are Old," and the person trying to find a city to live in from Talking Heads’ "Cities," to name just a few.
For Waldner, however, the road home is a metaphorical journey back to the self lost somewhere between a less idyllic past and still not perfect present. In the autobiographical "How To Make A Scientific Principle Into A Universal Convenience," for example, we meet a fifteen-year-old girl from Mississippi, observe her in her surroundings, witness her forays into sex and dope. In other poems we follow her around the country, watching as she resurfaces in Vermont, Maine, Iowa and elsewhere. In "Time Trials" she has moved up to the present and, now on the West Coast, looks back, questioning time, history, what the past has become, what she has become. "Now I am writing my way into now," she notes, "again and still, now, now full of then."
As that line reveals, her journey takes place in great part through language. She is "writing [her] way into now," and that writing – quick paced and vibrant – flies from one association to the next, moving swiftly in a strong, straight line through a field of allusions so dense at times that we have to run to keep up:
Tares among the wheat sewn. Gaia sewn. Irrigation ditches. Her hemline her shoreline the Imperial Valley. IV. Dynasty. Cleavage. Leverage. Slippage. You, here, this will work if I kneel over you, this is prayer, this is how I believe, this is how to iron a shirt, this is how to mend a broken, this is how to eat your vegetables. Tables, water, turn, stile, actuarial, Fashion Valley. Friend, let us pray. Play. Leisure. Suit. Knight of wands. Queen of cups. Let’s do some dishes, shall we? Cyrus McCormick, his reaper. Grim, the Brothers, Karamazov. Special K. Battle Creek. Best for you in the morning. Kansas OK. Iahoma. Dahomey. Demeter at home plate. Blue plate special. Her consort, the sky. Winter wheat: the empirical green’s function. He putts. Osiris. Birdie. Tweet.
Homing Devices moves like fire over a landscape, taking on surprising forms that are altered, transfigured, then abandoned. Caught up in the beauty and blur of the writing, we realize there’s no need to hurry home – it will still be there when we arrive.
you tilt the cup to your lips, so the waving grasses slant and turn pale before the dark trees, you tilt the world to your lips to drink and send the wind askew, and just before your tongue touches milk, the dark trees sound and you turn as if tapped on the shoulder to see white sheets waving on the night time line and the moon light shines in the cup and the sweet air moves across your cheek and you can wonder where home is later.
Guy Bennett
HOMING DEVICES, Liz Waldner — excerpt:
From: The Surfing Underneath
This alphabet is very small again; are there letters enough to spell my way to you? The glittery litter of moonlight on water, a way into and through and through. I hear the waves. Perhaps, I thought as a surfer sailed past the cliff-framed glimpse at the end of the street, Jesus surfed. Because at first, I thought it was someone fast-paced on the face of the waters.
The prattle of the ants, as they spell out moving what they mean, their hieroglyphs of leg, antennae and three-bead bodies, making of themselves the name of themselves. If you put properly lined paper beneath them, paper scored in a musical way, then you could have the music of the ant spheres. My dear. And if you herded ant feet through a sheen of beet, their traces could line faces or efface plans to meet destiny in later places by limning you with the feel of Now (and now and now and now). Mapping, getting it down right now. Get down right now, antling. Cat, ling, a fish. A thing and its desire. A cat-ling black as an ant in the prow of a pine yesterday eve then twined my shin like a pleasure vine when I talked it down to me. Talk it down. Spell it out. Be. Spelling bee. Quilting bee. You’re the bees’ knees. So am I. This is different from “but so am I,” note please. “But” is (and again) the butt joint, a way to sit down, one way smack broadside into another. Collisional conjunctive, provisional, subjunctive. What the bees know. Bees gather pollen tasties in the hollows behind their kneecaps. Although I loathe the word “tasties,” I made that sentence because I love you. I can’t help it. Either it. Do you know? You could, you know. You know, you could.
From: The Burden of a Prayerend and begin.
Jay with To Eat in its beak, this, then,
is desire, a device. To make me
allow to breathe. In tine. Fork
spaces at first but then. This, then
is a desire device. O star
fairest of all that shine
where
now shall I go
Copyright © 2002 O Books
