Saturday, December 06, 2008

Scott Owens Reviews Lit Windowpane

in the new issue of The Wild Goose Poetry Review

Spare, quiet, minimal in its approach, Suzanne Frischkorn’s new collection of poetry, Lit Windowpane, beautifully illustrates the power poetry has to say a great deal in only a few words. Most of the poems here are brief. “November’s Window,” the shortest, is not even as long as a haiku, 13 syllables in this case, and yet, those 13 syllables remind us of the power of the image to create deep, resonant meaning:

Street light’s orange glow--
a branding iron on the iris.

In these lines, the necessary glow of the street light metaphorically suggests the declining season of growth that now claims ownership of the iris. The title of the poem, as numerous titles in the collection, also reminds us of the importance of perspective, of the fact that, in the words of Paul Davies, “Nothing can be seen in isolation, for the very act of observation must involve a coupling of some sort.” It is this vital coupling, ultimately, that the speaker of these poems would have us meditate upon, a coupling that forbids us from taking things for granted and from letting the importance, the vitality, and the spirituality of the natural world vanish too easily.

2 comments:

Pam said...

beautiful words on your beautiful book...

Suzanne said...

:-)

xo