The Daily Glance
Eleni Sikelianos' Body Clock is both a book with a long historical consciousness and one about pregnancy and the growth of a body. In one poem we have lines like these:
Perceptible black, perceptible blue that the world contains
If you want to see the lights of a town go down
go to New York. If you want to see smoking holes and buildings bristling
out of Baghdad's back take a train to Brooklyn.
And in other poems we have lines like these:
You were born
& now you've torn our nights
to shreds & watch the minutes tumble inconsequential but
of consequent is every second
your supersize ears grow
away from you bumping.
The book contains what appear to be scanned images from a journal with drawing and words--words that become the poems. Moreover, throughout the book a conflict shows up between the body and the things that contain the body, like time and space. The baby's body grows against the limits but is still contained. Humans in settling their relationships (family, town, whatever) battle with these limits. Really, after reading The California Poem, it doesn't surprise me to read another high quality collection by Sikelianos.
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