Hatch Reflection

ISBN-13: 9781470085049 / Angielski / Miękka / 2012 / 236 str.

Mary-Helen Leet

Opis

Hatch Reflection, a book of poems Objects: A Leafy Sea Dragon, sea turtles, a humpback whale, Hawaiian reef fishes. Mayflies, damselflies, blue Alpine butterflies. Bats, shorebirds, white-tailed kites, and of course hermit thrushes. An adopted wild pig, children, fathers. Mothering. Hawaiian volcanoes, forest, ocean, rain, and night skies. Cascades forest fires and falling trees, WWII and other world crises. Subjects: Lacan, Aquinas, Buber, Eliade, Melville, Stiglitz. References: Includes a Notes section to clarify allusions or references which aren't developed in the text, and is really just intended for readers who might want to have them identified or elaborated. These readers will also probably recognize the little phrases and allusions here and there from Homer, Donne, Dante, Virgil, Shakespeare, Keats, Hopkins, Eliot, Pound, Stevens, Bishop, Thomas, Snyder, Sontag and other modern poets and writers even though they aren't referenced. Text: Our interest awakens when something approaches us, comes to meet us in nature, in wilderness, ocean, farmland, city parks, backyards. Nature so often rivets our attention and calls us up sharply to pay closer heed to some issue that has lingered just beneath the threshold of conscious awareness. As with people, the natural objects in our lives are not inert, but have a dynamic presence which draws us in various ways into relation with our reality, forming a continuous silent dialogue. In nature we find ourselves pondering phrases and images until they carry us beyond the limits of our memory; this imaginative widening and deepening of attention allows the new reality to enter through sensations and images, through sights, sounds, smells, and touch held in the body's memory, perhaps screening some secret absence. The author explores Lacan's theories of language function in the unconscious, luring the reader through a network of associations tangentially related particularly by sound or image to the ultimate statement. Redundancies are selected for their capacity to set in motion resonances connecting chains of signifying metaphors that move toward the mystery symbolized in the text. These semantic ambiguities operate though poetic techniques of interference, counterpoint, metaphor, metonymy, etc, all serving to draw parallels that lead to the literary goal. With Joseph Campbell and others, the author sees the central myth of our time as the Planet, which articulates for us how our life fits into a larger pattern, enabling us to recognize a sense of accord with the universe. She shows us what it looks like to experience the planet as a sustaining reliability that functions like a divinity, revealing the eternal radiating through the present and accomplishing the mind's task of retrieving lost spiritual forms and energies in our perceptions of the phenomenal world. For example, one of the book's long poems, "Whale," uses Melville's Moby Dick to set the scene and ask the questions central to the poem. But here the whale has clearly changed its meaning, as has the protagonists' answer to Melville's questions. Curious phenomena often capture the imagination. Natural objects, whether frightful or extraordinary, arouse a sense of sympathetic rapport between people and their objects, evoking "intimations of meanings figuratively apprehended." Kant describes this indwelling as "the treasure buried in the field of obscure ideas, constituting the deep abyss of human knowledge, which we cannot sound." The last section relies upon several WWII, Hawaiian, and current historians and economists. Among the WWII poems two in particular refer mainly to the 1944 Leyte Gulf sequences where the author's father was on a Third Fleet tanker, the USS Neches, and her husband's father was on a Seventh Fleet troop transport, the USS Anderson. The endangered US troops were actually rescued by a very, very strange occurrence.