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jimmylorunning's review against another edition
5.0
Simone White reminds me why poetry exists. Not to say the sayable. The kind of ambiguity here is so fearless. It's like I don't know what you're saying, but I get it. I really do. There is difficult poetry whose difficulty erects a wall against the reader, shutting him out, and then there is poetry like this which is difficult but also welcoming the reader into the mystery. I feel like that is a very personal judgement, but for me, this poetry's difficulty and obscurity is very welcoming and makes me open my eyes wider with wonder. I don't completely feel every poem here, but enough of them blow my mind that this is definitely a 5 star book for me. There are phrases here which seem so right, like the ones that you wake up with in the morning repeating though for no other reason than the sound and the feeling in your bones when you say them.
This is the small hill
This is the small hill
Landscape of the middle country
I love and I am on it stumbling down in high heels
This is the last evening
No light in the squandered wood
The gentleman farmer still awake
His back to my back
Verdant in blackness is a twinkling
Is a wet streamlike thing
Smellling like home
This is the last evening
I do not speak Japanese
I am twenty-nine and not thirty
I cannot say exactly what I want
The Senate hall across the sparse winter park
Specie of evening passed through her bulbs
Now noon/now dead of night
The witching hour every other hour
To catch the eye of the sergeant patrolling
The oxidized animal fountain
I call out
Do not cause me pain!
Here is the darkness come again
Or the light
A hawk's spin
The creekbed upending its loot
The hot hot breath of the freezing wood
On the last evening
In the middle country that I love
This is the small hill
This is the small hill
Landscape of the middle country
I love and I am on it stumbling down in high heels
This is the last evening
No light in the squandered wood
The gentleman farmer still awake
His back to my back
Verdant in blackness is a twinkling
Is a wet streamlike thing
Smellling like home
This is the last evening
I do not speak Japanese
I am twenty-nine and not thirty
I cannot say exactly what I want
The Senate hall across the sparse winter park
Specie of evening passed through her bulbs
Now noon/now dead of night
The witching hour every other hour
To catch the eye of the sergeant patrolling
The oxidized animal fountain
I call out
Do not cause me pain!
Here is the darkness come again
Or the light
A hawk's spin
The creekbed upending its loot
The hot hot breath of the freezing wood
On the last evening
In the middle country that I love
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