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“Swallows reminds us of course that writing great lyric is painstaking. On several occasions Corless-Smith seems almost obsessed with his own limitations, presenting cross-outs and revealing the indecision involved in realizing a poem—whether outlining an idea is necessary, or letting it lie implicit with fragment presents a truer truth. So those who’ve done it well are to be celebrated, and that they can be celebrated by exiting the limitations of the flat reality of things as they are and inhabiting the impossible house of language they unwittingly constructed. In the end, the book—the poet too? Up to you—possesses a mania that leaves you feeling you’ve been there to return.”—John Deming, www.coldfrontmag.com
Swallows uses the metaphor of the House to explore the uncanny presence and absence of self, and world, in poetry. With embodiments ranging from the eighteenth-century inquiry into the whereabouts of the Sabine Villa—a search determined to locate a physical site behind Horace's celebrated verse—to lines transcribed from the walls of a house, these poems acknowledge the desire for the presence of the physical in the written, while they reify the beguiling distance between writing and the world. Throughout the book, swallows act as a kind of genius loci: presences that arrive and depart continually.
Swallows is a continuation of Nota's neo-Romantic desire to react through words to some original world—to see that world as poetical and meaningful even as we acknowledge that the body of the poet vanishes in the instant of the poem, that the world is not manifest in the poem, and that it is impossible to know just what of the world or the self is ever iterable.
From the Book:
animals with a broader spectrum of vision, such as the squirrel, such as the rabbit, have a different sense of interiority. there is little behind their eyes
Age 36. Eat a cooked egg for breakfast
And for them survival is based on accepting interaction
exteriority is a priority.
A machine extends the surface of the body. Speaking through a machine is in kind no further from the self than speaking through your mouth the voice is the first machine of the self we feel distanced from. We are our hands differently than our voice.
The inside of the body is the same order of existence as the outside. Through fear we privilege the unobserved. The self is a machine. If we do not believe a car speaks for us.
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MARTIN CORLESS-SMITH is a native of Worcestershire, England. He teaches poetry and literature in the Creative Writing MFA Program at Boise State University. He is the author of Nota (2003), Complete Travels (2000), and At Piscator (1997).
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