Two reviews of Dark And Like A Web – yay! Beth Adams, in her note from the editor for Dark And Like A Web, spoke of ‘the pull of the divine, and the pull of the creative impulse, two forces not so separate as they may seem.’ And as I read other people’s take on these poems, I see more and more what she means. These are related impulses, very closely related. Are they in fact separate?
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, blogging at Kristin Berkey-Abott
Part 1 – “Does the Delivery System Impact My Reading Experience?” Kristin examines the multi-format publishing model used for Dark and Like A Web here.
Part 2 – Kristin looks at the poems themselves. “I like the ambiguity of the lines [of the last poem in the collection]. Is the speaker talking to a lover? To God? Is the speaker God? The poem works on all these levels, and makes me want to go back to reread the whole collection some more, even though I’ve read it several times. Will I discover other submerged religious possibilities?” Full review here.
Donna Vorreyer, blogging at Put Words Together, Make Meaning
“My favorite poems in the book are three that contain prayer beads as an integral image. Prayer beads are concrete, physical manifestations of a very private communication with the divine, and they counterbalance the other focus of these poems, the beloved. In each of these poems, the relationship with the beloved seems ephemeral, but the associations with the beads connected to each one are profound and lasting, almost equating the beloved with the divine.” (Full review here.)
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Two other nice things happened this week. One was this comment from Danielle Pafunda on Whale Sound. Danielle was revisting The Girls In The Apartment Upstairs, a poem of hers I read on Whale Sound last year. She wrote on Facebook this week:
Those Whale Sound archives are outta sight, aren’t they? Nic–your readings are so, how do I say it? Like intense analysis has happened and been translated smoothly into performance? Maybe the word for that is GOOD. I’m going to include them in the resources for my Mod & Contemp poetry seminar this fall–maybe one of the students will be inspired to try a similar final project!
This reminded me that another Whale Sound poet, Greg Sellers, (What The Wind Says) added Whale Sound to his “LibGuide for Poetry Writing” at the University of Alabama School of Library & Information Studies.
Define heaven, anyone?
A project of yours is flagged to students by teachers as worthy of attention. Woot, and woot again – I’m in heaven!
