The Daily Glance
Olivia Cronk's Skin Horse is filled with innovative language and interesting images, but really the thing that strikes me the most is its lyric quality. The poems don't read like traditional lyrics with narrative structures that limit the field; rather, the poems themselves seem to chronicle an open life. Reading them reminded me of T.S. Eliot's claim that lyrics are overheard poems. These poems feel like the reader is a side note. The we of the poems is not the reader/poet; instead, the poet is gathered with another person that the reader has no access to except through the stories and images that emerge, that are overheard and are fragmentary. The poems are filled with nature, with animals, with daily actives. I'm not sure if they are telling us anything specific as whole (of course, individually, insights abound), but they present a life that is intriguing and mundane at the same time.
I know what this is about.
I know it's midday:
the wired music of feeling sorry
and messed boa
and these crowds of telepaths
at the river's planet
and I don't care.
Olivia Cronk's Skin Horse is filled with innovative language and interesting images, but really the thing that strikes me the most is its lyric quality. The poems don't read like traditional lyrics with narrative structures that limit the field; rather, the poems themselves seem to chronicle an open life. Reading them reminded me of T.S. Eliot's claim that lyrics are overheard poems. These poems feel like the reader is a side note. The we of the poems is not the reader/poet; instead, the poet is gathered with another person that the reader has no access to except through the stories and images that emerge, that are overheard and are fragmentary. The poems are filled with nature, with animals, with daily actives. I'm not sure if they are telling us anything specific as whole (of course, individually, insights abound), but they present a life that is intriguing and mundane at the same time.
I know what this is about.
I know it's midday:
the wired music of feeling sorry
and messed boa
and these crowds of telepaths
at the river's planet
and I don't care.
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