Anne Blonstein

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Biographical note:  Born in 1958, Anne Blonstein has lived since 1983 in Basel, Switzerland, where she earns a living as a freelance translator and editor. Her poems and prose poetry have appeared in journals and anthologies in the USA, Canada, Britain, Switzerland and Austria. She has published a chapbook, sand.soda.lime, and collaborated with the Swiss composer, Mela Meierhans, on two works, canthus to canthus, and 4S.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781876857653
ISBN-10:  187685765X
ISBN-13:  9781876857653
Author:  Anne Blonstein
Title:  the blue pearl
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Apr-03
Extent:  120pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  7 mm
Weight:  180 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 poem works with patterns of phrase and space. Orders of words and deaths. Dispersed, with the precision and craft of stone inscriptions, the verses transform the page into sites to represent loss and knowledge.

The poem cannot retrieve all disintegrations. But recovers some in the ebb and flow of imagination across a sundered tradition. Depositing what it has recollected fretted through the caesuras of history.

The poem opening from the past opens the subject. It knows the body porous, but selective. A writing that reconceives with no endpoint.

< o >

Continuities like veins of impurity in a turquoise bead. Continuities like cracks in the faience of a Pharaonic amulet. Continuities like indigo-dyed threads in an ikat shawl.

Faults. Faults in grammar. Faults and forms in dialogue to adopt the otherwise.

One reader read through her station on the Berlin U-Bahn. One reader asks if this is a journal of the soul. One reader could be the angel of memory.

> o <

The poetic act is a journey through a wordscape of meiotic discourses. It gathers and sews the languages of biology, chemistry, archaeology. Thinks from mutation, synthesis and repair.

Presents crystallise out of a solution of the ancient, the recent and the immediate. Heiroglyphic and indigenous. Also as questions of beauty.

The book is not complete, it is lyrical. Warily, it celebrates even the absurd because it has lost lament. And cannot undo what the past has done.

Table of contents:
the rock-that-gave-birth-to-the-sky
hathor in egypt
anilineated dreams

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Excerpt from book:  

from anilineated dreams

’’0221

         she hears someone
on the other side of the moon.   she digs
for stardust in a flooded garden. sews a corpse
to a carol.   advancing and retreating
to protect an anonymous nature

          <     <     <

               she braids a biography
from both sides of now.     mixes sea-spray and ash
in a jar of how. her death’s a dress
she cannot recall.    putting her hand to her mouth
she pulls out a space
where others say
all    (sing)

          <     <     <

                   she wears
successful shoes
and a bright-pink apron.    her eyes caress
strangeness in soft shades of brown. her ring she recycles
from her self.    she wants to write an opera
whose hero isn’t killed
by a rose thorn

Review quote:  I first came to know Anne Blonstein when out of the blue she sent me some poems care of Mesechabe: The Journal of Surregionalism. Meticulously crafted, literate, erudite. I was mystified and not sure I wanted to read more if I was going to have to work so hard. But I couldn’t resist, it was so rare to get poetry of this kind

Dennis Formento
Square Lake

Review quote:  It is interesting to see a poet handling words as confidently as Ms Blonstein does here, notwithstanding the usual post-modern doubts as to the possibility of communication. A most unusual book, and one that I'm going to read again. Anne Blonstein seems an interesting discovery.

Tony Frazer
Shearsman