cover image VICINITIES

VICINITIES

Lisa M. Lubasch, . . Avec, $14 (95pp) ISBN 978-1-880713-27-3

Lubasch's second book comes hot on the heels of her award-winning premier volume, How Many More of Them Are You? (1999), which pointed toward the essay form as a kind of stylistic metaphor, arranging with in it a series of charged, one-line zingers that delve into the bottomless irony of philosophizing from, by and toward the self. Vicinities, by contrast, is a collection of lyrics that seem pitched toward finding a way out of the abyss. "Memories of Impermanence," a sort of spiritual diary in leap-frogging meter, is reminiscent of Jorie Graham's elliptical writing or, further back, Robert Duncan in high projective-verse mode: "We were trying/ to see into./ Air, even at this pace,/ moves into other/ speeds./ In her—/ seeing/ hastened away/ from, as if/ filling out a distance,/ budding into/ likeness,/ which, conceivably,/ could miss everything." While Lubasch's dramatizations of soul searching include her trademark rhetorically-overcharged apostrophes, here the speakers encounters with "evil," the past, pain, and one's ontological bounds are forebodingly (and self-consciously) submissive: "One must relinquish all ideas of guardianship,/ divorce oneself from seeing, prostrate oneself before darkness/ A long and quiet flight from the stir of dawn." Lubasch's touch with a shorter line is energetic and careful, and there is something quaintly retrograde in poems like "When I Walk," which recalls some of the play of abstractions of early Creeley. "The Harboring of Ends" suggests a deeper, religious nature, while "A Question Stood Before Her Like a Terrible Eye" is daringly spare and works the way painter Cy Twombly's scrawls energize a canvas. If it all doesn't come together with the searing, anti-vatic force of How Many, this book shows Lubasch working her way out of that book's almost-overwhelming influences (mostly 19th-century French), and toward something new and genuine. (Oct.)