Carlo Rovelli, Italian physicist, says that the world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events. Poet Diane Louie thinks of prose poems as little events. They are happening and happenings. They draw on experience, image, metaphor, and all the properties of language to create little worlds-in-motion-in motion being the operative words: spinning while orbiting, actively shifting our point of view.
More genus than hybrid species, prose poems can straddle the obvious limits and less-obvious liberties of perception. This active characteristic of spanning and connecting is especially relevant in a time of cultural polarization. Marrying, even uneasily, the inquiries of science and spiritual longing can illuminate what they-and we-have in common: a desire to understand our presence in a universe that does not yield ultimate answers.
Title: Fractal Shores: Poems (The National Poetry Series)
Author: Diane Louie (author)
ISBN: 9780820357904
Binding:
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Publication Date: 2020-11-30
Number of Pages: 88
Weight: 0.1290 kg
'We speak in concert with what speaks through us,' Diane Louie writes toward the end of this sublime collection. And so, too, what speaks in concert with and through these poems is a desire-to articulate the overlap of meaning and perception, to discern the negative space our memories make as they settle in the mind-so unexpectedly observed, so meticulously expressed that each page brought the texture of being alive into starker relief. With Fractal Shores, Louie affords an 'awareness of awareness of awareness' that will always stay with me. In these prose poems, Diane Louie finds possibility: what the world takes, what is left. Ruled by the sentence instead of the line, the concerns of the speaker are both cosmic and earthly. Yet, the bond between the two is as unbreakable as the line. If fractals are patterns within patterns, Louie uses self-similar structures found in nature as well as in life to demonstrate how interconnected all things in the universe are. This collection is stunning in its quiet, in its reserve, in its structure: what we opened opened us. Form mirrors content: patterns within patterns, sentences within paragraphs, words within sentences, letters within words, symbols as letters. What the poem bears, bears the poem. The form is a measure of the poet's steely control, of being in the world without controlling it: we say we're not gone when we say here I am. Fire, love, humanity, nature, gender, history, geographies, a canyon of light: these poems ache with such deliberate beauty.