New Time

Scalapino has proven to be one of experimental poetrys most successful genre-crossers, reducing narrative to its component agents and verbs and fusing them with epistemological investigations. Her disjunctive flow of phrasal units is a familiar post-modern strategem for replicating the minds mad race with time, but her inimitable staccato remains one of language poetrys signature achievements: landscape, delicateas sensory deprivationmilitary boyswearing training spurs of bottle capsgas stations, differentiatedcattle being. More diffuse than the brilliantly focused Way (1988), and a turn from recent prose-based works like Defoe, Scalapinos latest collection is conceived in stanza-like movements, and deliberately keeps narrative momentum in check, preoccupied with the contradictions between our inner and our outer lives: sleep-deprived one/ pressure so that the mind comes into the social unitonly/ the flowering trees, that have nothing but swimming on sky. Fragmentary perceptionsa river in Kyoto, the brown night, taxies, black silk irisesground aphoristic units of text that display influences from Emily Dickinson and Gertrude Stein to Wittgenstein. From page to page, phrases like the mind collapsing get recontextualized (the mind collapsing not on the surface; is the mind collapsing on its surface, its own space?) in a manner that many will find opens out into delicate meaning, but others will find frustrating. What emerges is an anxious paranoia over the selfs place in an exhausted body on the one hand, and a disintegrating social unit the othera vision that is not without a tentative hope. (May)