Wednesday 17 April 2013

Sandra Lim's Loveliest Grotesque (Kore Press, 2006)

Some favourite passages:


Fall shudders red and ochre, clean through to a various pain.


*

Once, inside a night of live stars and other improbable sky lights, the conversation seemed indispensable. I'll be so willing. Ever was. Ordinary behavior, and you can walk there.

from "A Village Journal"


I wanted to see the themes grow inside us
like a talent or a tumor. Pure accident.

from "Last Mash Note"


Survival & reverie salt the palate....

from "Ballad of the Last Chance"


--sub-rosa ways of understanding self and others. The blue streak you take as a personal asterisk.

from "Where Metaphorical Moves Get Started"


...the thickening allusions alighted on all our shoulders with a look of loneliness.


the end of "What Is an Image?


                                        So there
we are, in low relief: creaturely, comely,
deducible wholly by what we have lost.

the end of "Year of the Gallows Birds"


The saddening ways slam
back and forth like a metal screendoor.

opening lines of
"You Could Feel That Freedom Coming On Too"


So often you don't think,
"Little nicks of monstrosity, I shall be splendid in it."

last lines of "Just Disaster"



Intent on being expressive rather than lovely, they are practically breaking with light and dark.

*

Dear unkind world, should we wonder after quiddity?

*

These rifts, these hungry expressibles, they are swiftly drawing me on.

from "There Is No Wing Like Meaning"


There is ground between loving and being pleased. See, it is a city unto itself.

from "'Wish You Were Here'"


The ferocity of the world inside has the might of weeds.

*

I feel so "personal" despite the fact that I am standing alongside myself, subject to dispersal.

*

I sing as a girl shedding the fever garden, as a boy tasting the knife of her. Word-slung and feral, I happen upon "those places in the body that have no language" but there really is no shielding in the end.

*

You'd like something of maximum vehemence and physical grace. Instead, "A Day! Help! Help! Another Day!"

from "Equilibrium"
(NB This poem has footnotes I couldn't easily include here.)


I hang the air with barbeque smoke
winding up my walk and my weft.
I longitude, I latitude, I spangle
from the core.

from "Touring, Touring, Gone"



Much later, what emerged unexpectedly but poppy. Nodding red, nodding orange, but always darkly nodding away. Between her and poppy, a torn-up world of cause and effect, pasts and prologues, broken clocks, the clatter in parting.

last stanza of "Afterword"


And the indifference of the island
bellows from shelf to shelf. A turtle rubs along.

from "Blind Future"



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