the blue pearl

Synopsis

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.

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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.

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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.

Reviews of this Book

‘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

‘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