La parola da casa, Serena Piccoli

The Daily Glance

Mary Kasimor's silk string arias is a book of short poems that play around on the page.  There's not any specific theme that runs throughout, but the pieces share a similar style, so the book works as a whole well.  Plus, Kasimor wrote a brief poetics for the end of the book.  I read it after reading the book, and it says much of what I expected it to say, except that it adds some personal details about Kasimor's life that I found interesting.**  From the work, it's clear that Kasimor views these pieces as a step against "materialism" or consumerism.  They make quick shifts in the thought paths, and often, lines do not clearly relate.  She does this on purpose to make us connect disparate ideas.  Take, for example, "Butterflies":  

you sleep besides plums
i keep the garden
in these quiet duplexes
empty birds fill
the roof
and lift it without any direction
ruffling the lawns
cobwebs press the news
of spiders
maintaining the lace as
silly creatures
worms
and butterflies
stasis in the mud
we belong
collecting the daily dirt

Everything connects in this poem, but how it connects is not clear because the transitions between sections have been removed along with the punctuation.  Does "ruffling the lawns" go with "cobwebs" or with "birds"?  Does it refer to the animal/insect life?  Of the human working the lawn?  Is the "we" of "we belong" people or the speaker and the butterfly or all the life forms in the piece together?  Most of the poems in this book work in a similar fashion, so that the reader has, perhaps, a larger part in making the meaning of these poems than in more straight-forward work.

**Even if I would not admit it, I would read poetry gossip.  I think someone should start a site aggregating all of the poetry news from places like Facebook and Twitter and write paparazzi-style articles on poets.