Haunting and spare, The Wind, Master Cherry, The Wind is obsessed with
fate's fickle nature. Propelled by internal rhyme, these lyric poems
draw on fairy tales and fables, stories from the Bible and from Carlo
Collodi's Pinocchio, their characters blown hither and thither by
mythic winds--but -inevitably, toward an awareness of mortality.
Inside the Dog-Fish
Wide as the church, the sea, the cavern,
hard as a rock, a tree, a geyser, tight
as the spot of birth, hot as the furnace,
serpent, witch, plain as the ego, primitive,
tomb, loose as a swallow's whirling torso,
fiery vertebra--madre terribile, mother
of agony, atony, urge, providing a passage,
a sabbath, excuse, symbol of charm
gone darkly sour, emotional windbag
pricked by the light of the luna cornuta,
spitting up trinkets and bottles of rum,
and pages of books, and chunks of men.
Mark Strand describes Edward Hopper's work as being informed by two
imperatives, one that urges us to continue and the other that compels us
to stay. Such is the experience of reading The Wind, Master Cherry, The
Wind, Larissa Szporluk's demanding and brilliant new book: we are both
urged -forward and held back by its mysterious intellection. -Szporluk's
work is about meaning: what can be known and what cannot be, what can be
divulged and what must be withheld. The Wind, Master Cherry, The Wind
is fraught with such taut pleasures. This is poetry both luscious and
rigorous.--Lynn Emanuel
