|
|
 |
|
|
|
 |
|
 |
Laurie Sheck is the author of three previous books of poetry including The Willow Grove, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work appears widely in such journals and magazines as The New Yorker, The Kenyon Review and Boston Review. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ingram Merrill Foundation, among other institutions, Sheck has been a member of the creative writing faculty at Princeton University and currently teaches in the M.F.A. program at the New School. She lives in New York City.
Photo (c) Nina Subin
|
|
|
|
|
|
In her remarkable Black Series, Laurie Sheck turns the ordinary world inside out and shows us its glittering seams. Her long, elegantly quizzical lines convey a haunted vision of human striving which is in part an elaboration on our daily reality, and in part a fantastic departure from it. “I can almost taste the glassy air,” she writes. “Where are the birds in it, / wings lifting as currents buffet them like echoes, bright / chaos of atomized instances . . . ?” Roaming freely in the shifting landscape of the imagination, Sheck delivers an inner life that is just as vivid as what we see around us; at the same time, she shows us what we see in a new light, bringing illumination even to darkness:
It’s the black night that wakes in me,
so dominant, so focused.
And then a car goes by and I think,
“I’m in the world,”
tires kicking up gravel from the dust.
What does the orange hawkweed do
inside this dark–its radiance
secretive but not extinguished?
To read this collection is to discover at every turn that secretive but undeniable radiance, and a language that is both riveting and distinctive.
"Rarely, if ever, has the contemporary lyric been both so pure and so informed with varieties of experience; the historical and the mythic and the utterly everyday; crack addicts and Medusa and Goya, carpenter bees and graffiti, the blur of a xerox and the evocativeness of cave paintings; all conveyed with a startling precision of perception and reflection and locution. This is fine work, both delicate and bold." --C.K. Williams
"An illuminated insight and wit highlight the deep-seeing of Laurie Sheck's Black Series. This is a seeing into things that is musical, a taking apart and putting-back-together that cast the human eye as godlike--almost Emersonian. What we think we know is imagistically probed till it reveals something we didn't know. In this sense, the poems in Sheck's wonderful book are "spies of light": they disrobe our senses so that each of us is Goya's apprentice, honing our skills to see in the dark. Here nothing is borrowed; each poem's imagery is direct, seldom beyond us, yet always challenging. We can all savor Black Series, an exhibition of lyrical surprises." --Yusef Komunyakaa
"Laurie Sheck is a modern shaman, a storyteller who knows that the best stories are not those that merely entertain but those that accompany us long after their telling . . . Just as in ancient worlds myths offered the templates for negotiating a safe path through terrors natural and Olympian, Laurie Sheck's poems find embodiments for the maladies of the new millennium: anxiety and the terror of affluence, alienation in the midst of commerce, and the illusion of Free Will in the Free World. Imagine being plopped down in this civilization without prior knowledge of it; imagine having to map your way without any clues but those the mysterious person guarding the city gates chooses to give out. 'Listen carefully,' she whispers; and you do, because your life depends on it." --Rita Dove, Washington Post Bookworld
|
|
|
|
|
Laurie Sheck interweaves the contemporary with the mythic, creating a realm in which such things as radios, skyscrapers, expressways, and mannequins are at once familiar and strange; immediate, yet tinged with the light of distance and myth. It is a realm where faces on a television newscast disappear "into the undertow / of hunger for the next thing and the next," and mannequins "stand in their angelic armor." Placed at intervals throughout these pages is a series of poems entitled "From The Book of Persephone," poems that explore the underworld through a fractured contemporary lens, depicting it as a psychological landscape of isolation and desire. As Mona Van Duyn said of Laurie Sheck's previous book, Io at Night, "When her sensibility and the reverberating myth are in perfect conjunction, the extraordinary happens: the mythical figure enters the poet's imagination so consumingly that it is impossible to tell whose life, whose feelings fill the form on the page."
"It's daring of Laurie Sheck to have made the myths surrounding Io so crucial to the central tenor of her poems, but the themes of exile, distance, and freedom from the falsehoods of secular appearance weave the title into her images, along with her own dedicated attention and moral passion." --W. S. Merwin
"Io at Night is a rare achievement: A delicate, truly poetic sensibility has internalized and transmuted powerful myth, making memorable verse. Central to the collection is the classical myth of Io, with its resonant themes of exile, loss, and the longing for return, that provides explicit text for five poems and subtext for the rest of the collection. Io herself becomes both a living presence and metaphor for a fullness, whether of knowledge or being, only rarely achieved." -- Robert E. Hosmer Jr., America
"Sheck's subjects are unabashedly big and not the least bit quaint. In her best poems the personal and mythic conspire to create an altogether memorable human story." --Henri Cole, Poetry
|
|
|
|
|
|
