Lace-Circled Darkness

2007, Erbacce Press (www.erbacce.com), 40pp.


review by Hugh Fox


Strongin is not merely one of the richest, most-varied, super-literate, historically-informed, innovative poets on the current scene, but in the whole of English-language poetic history.

No one else has ever outdone her when it comes to imagistic layering/accretions: “We file in/Finlandia by Sibelius/I would burn like a matchstick under a mountainous chandelier/of Murano glass//ceiling streaming/with gods, goddesses/likeness of my host/if I were in Venezia, a maverick, a moniker/long ago./Seventeenth century.” (“We File In,” no pagination.)

Moniker? Murano glass? Finlandia? Sibelius? And N.B. how she unites matchsticks and mountaineous chandeliers....always the same kind of piled-up richness.
She writes intensely every day, her entire life circled around her creativity. I have been receiving daily e-mails from her for years and every day it’s the same richness, richness, richness. No one else around on the scene (except perhaps Lo Galluccio) can take the everyday and transform it into such timelessness. A mentor to read, read and re-read.