Lubasch's three previous books (including To Tell the Lamp
) and translations from the French have carved her an elegant niche all her own: abstract, ethereal explorations of a mind pitched toward divagation. The result: spaces of unknowing opened up by open-ended thought, and very beautiful ones at that. Here, Lubasch reaches new heights of formal variety; in rigorous short stanzas, in free-floating painterly lines and in prose blocks—some made of sentences, others of breathless hyphenated phrases—Lubasch evokes anxiety and anticipation through phenomenology and ontology, and through the simple passing of time. Precursors from Emily Dickinson to Michael Palmer come to mind as Lubasch presses on, her "self— reformulated as scribble—/ its untoward aspect— diminishing." (Apr.)
