Jane Joritz-Nakagawa’s Meditations beautifully combine the inward focus of reflection with the leaps and breakages of contemporary urban life — a life in which meditative stillness is elusive, if not impossible. At the meeting-point of real-world politics and poetic internality, The Meditations jump-cut between the rhetorics of capitalism and constant war (“as if the weapons were moving // entirely in the wrong direction”) and hard-won lyric flight (“horses laugh // and clouds put on their aprons”). Throughout, Joritz-Nakagawa plays with line-breaks and white space, with orthography and diacritical marks — all of which syncopate syntax and hint at the manifold meanings hidden in phonemes. Like tesserae, her words and lines create — through fragments —exquisite patterns. These are poems that “enter the language partial / and come out / whole.”
—Elisabeth A. Frost
You must be logged in to post a review.
Please log in
1
Person Reviewed This Item
By jane
May 17, 2012
Copy of Poetry Kanto review http://poetrykanto.livejournal.com/?skip=40 by POETRY KANTO editor, Alan Botsford 10/30/09 03:34 pm - "The Meditations"(Otoliths, 2009) poems by Jane Joritz-Nakagawa If Life has a story for each of us, how do you re-mix the story? You don't. It would only slip through your fingers like water. Instead, you listen for the song of yourself deep from within and live by it faithfully, come what may. The new language we need to learn, Jane Nakagawa takes pains to show us, is the soul's language. And one way soul speaks to us is through the wisdom of the dream. This is the start on the path of poetry, perhaps the origin of poetry itself. It is here, in the darkness of night, that body and soul unite in spirit, whose knowledge and fruition is holy. Using sign (& symbol) language, discourses between interior & exterior, dreams, word-fractures, word-games, empathic imagination stretches (“the homeless…/ water going over their heads”), time-shifts,... More > painterly stanzaic patternings, literary allusions (and no doubt a host of other devices I’ve omitted or missed), Jane Nakagawa in her latest book offers meditations as mediations that, in spite of “what covers or / hides where the last thought is now/ a cemetery of / language”, are sometimes “hopeful” and never anything less than “discerning.” http://stores.lulu.com/l_m_young http://the-otolith.blogspot.com< Less
