Book Review

Lo, Bittern
by C.J. Martin
Atticus Finch Press (2008)
28 pg.
$10.00
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Atticus Finch puts out exquisitely and imaginatively designed chapbooks of quality literature. This one is no exception. Lo, Bittern consists of very short poems playing with the microtonal shifts which can be produced and manipulated in language when it is broken in random or perverse ways.

The cover art on this splendidly-designed chap features a sculpture by Louise Nevelson repeated a dozen times in frames, arranged with different orientation and varying obscuration of detail in each "frame." This is in black and laid down on an egg-carton pink cover which is made out of (guess what) egg carton material. The book has a spongy, resilient feel as a result of this choice of materials. It was a truly sumptuous design-choice. The cover's insistence on permutations of a single object seems to reflect the poetics contained within very well. There is much negative capability to the poems, so they also seem to undergo permutations with repeat reads.

If you love only the vernacular in poetry, you will hate these poems. I happen to be a lover of the vernacular, but I also happen to like poetry which obsesses over morphemes, phonemes, the molecules of language. These poems do that.

There are flaws of course. Some of the poems are more resistant to productive reading than others. That's to be expected. Also, the name-dropping (Messiaen, Richard Tuttle, Rachel Blau-DuPlessis) can be a little heavy-handed in places, and one is always wary of an author glad-handing greatness in that manner.

But then there are successes and pleasure.

I like best the poems which seem to be after Celan, I think. Try this:

BLUEST STUBEL,
   Don't run to sex-of-fox, heaving
   None lo, so founder-pt. (Nor beltus be,
   though nothing could: hills, hills, down,
   root, left, roots, the, het.


The author seems to like anagram play, as in that last line.

This is an enjoyably cryptic book. If you like works which keep the ghost rather than giving it up, then this little book is for you.

The ear and the playfulness betoken good or great future books from this author, but (to speak candidly) I hope he evolves away from the hermetic, and towards a poetics which can accommodate clearer manifestations of the polis, the Lebenswelt, whatever you want to call this fucking life we must negotiate...

But I can recommend the playful perversity found in Lo, Bittern for you lovers of errant plasticity and mediumistic seances with the Oujia board of your native tongue.