THE WIND, MASTER CHERRY, THE WIND
Larissa Szporluk, . . Alice James, $13.95 (68pp) ISBN 978-1-882295-39-5
Szporluk's compellingly slippery third volume includes sharp wit, linguistic subtleties, and an ambitious seriousness about parents, children, ecology, fairy tales, women's bodies and spiritual need. Her disarming opening poems find plays on words near bodies of water: "Come, swim, under./ The summer flounder compound's/ in a thunder," one begins. In "Fruit of Discord" ludic language gradually opens to reveal real loneliness: "To construct/ a man made of grass/ is the grass widow's need." A strong lyric sequence names poems after kinds of winds, from China's "Sz" to the Swiss Alps' "Schneefresser," where "A boy glitters,/ becoming snow": each wind represents, it slowly becomes clear, both a way of regarding the earth and a kind of human need. The more directly stated sequence "Pineal Body" riffs and reimagines the tale of Pinocchio, while a last set of lyric poems returns to yearnings and affections: "Here comes a girl with a gill for a lung/ crossing the morning." Szporluk (
Reviewed on: 07/21/2003
Genre: Nonfiction