| two books split the prize in this Four Way Bookscompetition m Stuart Friebert's Funeral Pie (a collectionmarked by unusual warmth and forthrightness, humor and a~lloquial immediacy) and the book you have before you,Sarah Gotham's pattern-appointing, elegantly artful work TheTension Zone. I was lucky to be able to award both books thefirst phce distinction (Four Way is a press with a taste for theeclectic). These two books remind us, despite rumors to thecontrary, how varied and inventive American poetry remains. Gorham's The Tension Zonewill not easily be subsumedunder any banner. Perhaps its most easily notable feature is thehomage it pays to forms. By forms I mean not only literaryforms- though a remarkable series of sonnets is woventhrough the book, concentrating on the life of the ChineseEmpress Dowager. These sonnets contain elegant turns ofperception and inteUection, but frequently close with a fero-cious power, like the jaw of a beautifully-furred predator. Tosay that they operate by a combination of mind and musclemight suggest some qualities of Gorham's literary powers. Butthrough all the poems runs a love of forms even more funda-mental: Gotham pays a constant close attention to the shapesof experience, the patterns which befall us in a physical world. And her best poems attend to the forms of ideas. The~ical geometries of"Surveyors" move "the search for exactvalue" through vectors of analog to "no place like home" and"someone's idea of hell." The bright nuggets of the poem"Casual Lies" are diamonds of insight, served to the sensualt?~ even the tub of margarine and "the knife, inherited" serve occasions- not (as is so common in contemporaryAmer- |
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