The Bone China Years by Barry Schwabsky
$20.00
Barry Schwabsky’s poetry takes you to mysterious places but it always calls you home. As Marjorie Welish has written in The Poetry Project Newsletter, it “assumes that the debris of one’s mind is the very stuff of poetry. Stray thoughts and self-commentary issuing in excess of what one ought to be doing of a determinate and productive nature, are discontinuously ever-present and ever-ready to be intuited, so by no means wasted. Schwabsky, attuned to this intuitive zone, does not overstate the case for its significance, but in effect displays these intuited by-products of mental representation for possible consideration: is this a poem? If so, on what grounds? Feelings, then, are the subjective remainders of experience as yet to be categorized, let alone anointed as literature. No larger-than-life theatrics here, nor emphasized significance; the feelings here come about through the merest indications of experience, for which the first-person singular is co-present. Attentive to properties and their relationships, but with no expectation of entailment, the poet gives assent to matters that strike him as peculiar.” Those peculiar matters that make up poetry are wholly of this world yet can be somehow quite unearthly. They slip through among otherwise mutually uncommunicable realities. Perhaps there is a clue in the epigraph to The Bone China Years, taken from the Pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus: “A man in the night kindles a light for himself when his vision is extinguished; living, he is in contact with the dead when asleep and with the sleeper when awake.”
About the Author
Barry Schwabsky’s previous books with Black Square Editions are the poetry collections Book Left Open in the Rain, Trembling Hand Equilibrium, and Feelings of And, as well as a collection of critical writings, Heretics of Language.
He is art critic for The Nation and an editor at Artforum.
