Over the next few weeks or months, I will post all my reviews (“Tom’s Celebrations”) that appeared in Redactions: Poetry, Poetics, & Prose (formerly Redactions: Poetry & Poetics) up to and including issue 12. After that, my reviews appeared here (The Line Break) before appearing in the journal. This review first appeared in issue 4/5, which was published circa early 2005.
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A certain poet lamenting about his newest collection of poems – it not having enough good poems – shared his uncertainty about the book with Ezra Pound. Pound, trying to put the new collection of poems & the poet into perspective, commented something like, “If you are lucky enough to have one or two good poems in a book, then you have a good book.” Sajé’s book has more than a couple of good poems, & one great poem – thus a great book, if we extend Pound’s line of thinking.
“I See” is a poem I keep returning to. It is an intelligent poem that “bends” Gertrude Stein’s “A rose is a rose is a rose.” But the poem itself is not heavy-intellectual, like Stein can be; it’s the reverberations that create this intelligent poem – & so far the reverberations have sustained themselves for over a year with the reader. This poem, among others, shows how the lens of language can “bend” perception, can bend what isn’t into what is, so as to realize “then what can’t be mistaken / for something that it’s not?” This poem also succeeds because the poem makes us experience what the speaker experienced & in the same manner, & I suspect in the same amount of time. The experience traveled to the page & all the way over to this reader, which is what a great poem does. I’d love to quote more of the poem, but the experience needs to be had in full.
Nonetheless, Natasha Sajé’s Bend (Tupelo Press, 2004) is filled with more intriguing stories/experiences that bend unexpectedly, more lyrics that twist freshness from the mundane or anticipated, & more dialogues between language & perception, but all the while the poems stay clear & inviting. The language is always fresh, always moving, & always bending.//
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Sajé, Natasha. Bend. Dorset, VT: Tupelo Press, 2004.//