Annie Finch

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Biographical note:  Annie Finch’s books of poetry include Eve (1997), Calendars (2003), and a forthcoming translation of the Complete Poems of Louise Labé. Her collaborations include the opera libretto Marina, which premiered from American Opera Projects with music by Deborah Drattell. She has also written, edited or coedited books on poetics, including An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art and The Body of Poetry (2005) in the Poets on Poetry Series from the University of Michigan Press.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844710362
ISBN-10:  184471036X
ISBN-13:  9781844710362
Author:  Annie Finch
Title:  The Encyclopedia of Scotland
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  20-Jun-04
Extent:  124pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  7 mm
Weight:  186 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  The Encyclopedia of Scotland is a passionate invocation to a Muse at once abundant and excruciating, a performance poem for soul-voice and attendant daemons. At one time performed by Finch with a musical ensemble, this rhythmic feast enacts a complex ritual of self-initiation into the realm of poetry.

Table of contents:
Introduction
0. Invocation
1. Coals to Newcastle
2. Mountain to Mohammed
3. Rockwood
4. Feeding the Admiral’s Pussycat
5. Recessional
Footnotes
Appendices

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Excerpt from book:  

from Coals to Newcastle

Two

La la la la la
la la la la la.
You can terrorize somebody that way

There’s the lake
Jump in

The bells are the wind
and the air is the branch
as the priest bows three times at communion
As the priest bows at communion
you can hear them very dimly in the church
The crack of light on furniture
glows like communion forgiving the bread
Outside they are rustlings, irritations or errors
So soft that the bells are the wind, and the air is the branch.

Now words are silence to us, silence,
peace and silent noise and fear
down the middle of the back
tongued like strange lights humming in your own house

It is like wave upon wave.
The torment horizontal.
Oh I didn’t tell you that part.
Oh great she’s going swimming.
They’re going to save her.
It’s funny how in black and white it rarely looks like it’s sunny.
Oh God look it’s sunlight
(Striping the walls)
It’s all red and green
Look at it!

Unpublished endorsement :  In the face of technological and consumer culture, Finch’s fanciful libretto opts for evanescence over irony, sensual pleasure over theoretical critique. Hidden codes and secret pleasures, nursery rhymes and popular songs, primordial ooze and joyous sound-patterning animate these pages. “Will we dissolve”? she asks. Her persistent image of “ink in the water” argues that we will. Friskily sporting with lofty tones and poetic apparatus, The Encyclopedia of Scotland (written in 1980) anticipates works such as Lisa Robertson’s Debbie: An Epic and Stacy Doris’ Paramour. Here is high artifice and sonic astonishment, here is a unique mind at literary play.

Jennifer Moxley

Review quote:  The easiest way to describe The Encyclopedia of Scotland is as an attempt to thrust one’s poetry in all directions, directed largely by the sensual pleasures of language itself. As such, it bears a distant kinship with a number of disparate works, including those of Mina Loy & even the Baroness Else von Freytag-Loringhoven, Bob Brown & Bern Porter, Lee Ann Brown’s ventures into the ballad, Robert Duncan’s Stein imitations of the early 1950s, and, perhaps most closely, the ludic verse of the late Lynn Lonidier. Not, as I said, your typical new formalist fare.

Ron Silliman
Silliman’s Blog