Carol Snow (2)

Snow is a poet of attention and silence. To read her is to unbusy the mind. In these poems, her emphasis on breath is almost yogic. Breath becomes the “tether,” a word that recurs and which is the title of one of the poems. We are tethered to perception by the breath. Breath also occurs as “tidal—ardor . . . fervor . . . horror . . . as moon—”. Hanging out laundry, visiting a memory-less musician father: the poems deal in primal elements as if witnessing the birth of the universe when “the silence was huge.” There are lovely lines throughout, such as “you were held//so still, you thought that you might become those hills,/or must have been borne by hills,// or maybe your body/ had been a maquette for the hills.” The title of the collection, “For,” reappears in the poem “Mask Series” as “where the eyes were looking was for.” Looking here is related to creation of/by/in the universe and creation of/ by/ in art. The poems are painterly in their attentions. Visual art and the art of the visual become touchstones as well as formal guides or guides to form. Snow’s reconstruction of perception seems both cubist and organic, resembling the bivalves she pries loose from a dock in "Bowl." In "Position Paper" she says “I found I could position my gaze,” a statement which succinctly sums up this poet’s approach to both the world and the page. Hers is a world in which the most damning epithet might well be “Miss Absenting Herself, Miss Attention Elsewhere.”… (more)

I was underwhelmed by this collection. Considering that I've very much appreciated other books by Carol Snow, such as Artist & Model and For, I was surprised by this. One criticism: strange coming from me, since I too include citations, footnotes, end notes etc. in my poetry, I felt inundated in citation here: epigraphs, footnotes, acknowledgements, end notes. Perhaps because the poems themselves are often very short, making for more citation than poem in some cases. That's an interesting "statement," but left me feeling a bit absent to it all. Some nice lines, of course, here and there, such as "I'd like to introduce my dissociate." from "Vocabulary Sentence(s)," the entirety of "Poem": "Not thought, exactly: a refrain/ of thought," & the entirety of "Koi": "(I)// was doing my best to see them,/ what with the reflection." A great new word too, from "Gallery": "violinisting." In fact, Snow is at her best here when she taps into that other aspect of her life: music: "I tried to/ listen in triplets or randomness--tick, tock--the/ lyric, based on a pendulum." ("Coined")… (more)