"This must be some specious season, quick and numbered, pulling the this-world to quivered, hectic ends. Sepals could count it. Pistils, pearly queens. Little godhead stamens, tense, erected. All this intends," writes Volkman with the mischievous authority of a sideshow barker standing before the curtains of reality, ushering the reader into a slipstream of cosmic, sensually redolent speculation. Alliteration and near-hypertrophied wordplay abound (one poem even declares "The day un-days"), and Volkman convincingly melds her engagement with the ludic quality of words with the marvelously chaotic commerce of the natural world. Unnatural pairings of nouns, verbs or adjectives ("tremor and debit," "blur and spend," "numb, recumbent dust") often combine with a conclusive, if inscrutable, declaration of being, as when a poem ends, "I am more than carbon or echo: I am fame," and another (on the facing page), "If words are wire and can whip him, this is
the scar." The pronounced artificiality of Volkman's idiom thwarts any easy emotional identification with her subjects; this literariness, which edges into irony ("O coronet—your silver purpose stunts the weeds, the thrashy frays. I won't stall the morning to please you..."), produces an inescapable sense of remove. Volkman's speaker often adopts the pose of one who has worked through the riddles of existence as an English colonial might have worked through an Indian market, muscling through to get a better view of the multicolored objects and evocative scripts, which finally can't signify. Still, these poems are involved, elusive and often startling performances. (Apr.)
Forecast:Volkman attended the University of Iowa's MFA program and is currently poet-in-residence at the University of Chicago. Her
Crash's Law was a National Poetry Series pick; this book should garner attention on campus and in literary reviews.
