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Samples of reviews of Carrier of the Seed
Marjorie Perloff:
'It’s
very striking. The reader is propelled forward, thematically and mythologically.
The result is extremely interesting.'
'An
engaging avalanche of a poem, and I like the collision of various registers of
language throughout the poem. Overall, a feel of contemporary myth-dream
propelled narrative to it. A truly contemporary quest.'
Andrew Duncan: ‘It
negates a whole repertoire of well-loved effects and also demands the reader to
switch off their routine response and find a new way of reacting to the text. Carrier,
presented as one long continuous strip, has a straightforward phonetic
organisation: every line is three words long. This disconnects the line break
from the flow of sense of the text. The telltales, which show someone's
emotional state, which make it possible to slip into the rhythm of a text and a
situation, are effaced. The text thus breaks free from the limits of a soul and
could for example be the voices of several different people, standing at
different points of a situation. It ceases to be owned by a personality, which
we could try to reconstruct in order to identify with it and share what it
owns.’
‘The
poem is breathlessly written, imbued with distinctive imagining and, perhaps
surprisingly, it also maintains a satisfying, dynamic-yet-steady rhythm, reading
like a long, measured monologue or song. Side intersperses antiquated traces
that sometimes suggest classic fairy-tales - robes, kingdoms, forests, parlours,
maidens, minstrels, pilgrims, with a contemporary everyday lexicon of
cybernetics and with plain speech. The made-up language overtakes the poet
intrinsically and emphasises the suffusion of feeling that pulses throughout the
poem.’
Adam Fieled: ‘Reading
the poem is like riding on a high-velocity train; it doesn't get sluggish, and
there are no breaks in the continuity of the sustained, rapid rhythm. This is a
poem that takes what someone like Barrett Watten did and extends its range. It
has the kind of heart and soul that Watten does not, yet it maintains the sleek
feeling and pungent sharpness of Watten.’
John Couth: 'All
the way through to the poem's conclusion, with its implied continuation, the
reader will have embarked down an extraordinary route of languages, registers
and vocabularies, which function to arrest, surprise and disrupt, languages that
flow together, collide and cut across each other's current like a plaited
waterway. In turn, this flow has been enriched by the assimilation of artefacts
from different generations of writers; these deepen the work interlacing it with
echoes and experiences from different times and cultures. The integration of so
many disparate elements into one cogent construct is the poem's triumph.'
Jake Berry:
'Excellent,
mythopoeic, my kind of stuff.'
John M. Bennett: 'Say,
this is an excellent piece.'
Michael Rothenberg:
'I
like it a lot.'
Full reviews can be found at:
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