Here's Eudora Welty, writing about the photographs in The Democratic Forest, by my favorite photographer, William Eggleston:
They focus on the mundane world. But no subject is fuller of implications than the mundane world! When you see what the mundane world so openly and multitudinously affirms, there is everything left to say.After reading Aimee Nezhukumatathil's new poetry collection, one is more convinced than ever that poets -- or, at least, this particular poet -- unlike ordinary human beings, have different eyes through which to see: the reds of a jungle, a sari swinging over the shoulder, cherry farmers, potatoes pulled up from the earth. Each poem in her quietly stunning Miracle Fruit is a finely calibrated balancing act of breathlessness and restraint, sprinkled with words that must be savored in the mouth: "fire sponges, jingle shells, a remnant of whelk," she writes.
Here's an almost random excerpt, the last stanza of "In Praise of Colophons:"
My favorite colophon reports that another monk
designed Carlyle over two centuries ago. Its letters
sit round and open as fishbowls on a windowsill.
The balance so delicate, one strong wind
could spill the glass and its slippery contents
across the stone floor. O, but the light in each
watery leaf, the small transparencies in those fins --
the arc of orange fish that leap and leap and leap.
Her poems are afflicted with the ecstasy of small things, with an exuberant, barely containable delight in the ordinary. Look, she says to the reader, these are the miracles I see. And you must see them too.
Posted by the wily filipino at October 27, 2003 08:29 AM