Reluctant Gravities: Poems

Once again poet and translator Rosmarie Waldrop pushes the boundaries and definitions of poetry, prose, gender, relationship, even language itself in her new volume of prose poem dialogues , Reluctant Gravities. Intended as a sequel to The Reproduction of Profiles and Lawn of Excluded Middle, Reluctant Gravities gives the rhetorical you addressed in those earlier volumes a voice and response. I decided to give the second person equal time , says Waldrop. But I’m not interested in characters, psychology, or in poetry’s traditional ‘persona’ or mask. The voices do not ‘represent, ’ but frame the synaptic space between them . Some of Waldrop’s concerns are formal. She cultivates cuts, discontinuity, leaps, shifts of reference in her attempts to compensate for the lack of a margin, where verse would turn toward the white of the page, toward what is not. Her gap gardening tries to place the margin, the emptiness inside the text . But the point of the dialogues is purely human as the two voices with wit and philosophical playfulness debate aspects of Aging , Depression , Desire , and even The Millennium .Author of over 15 books of poetry, prize-winning translator of Jabes and Celan, teacher, and (with husband Keith Waldrop) publisher of Burning Deck Press, Rosmarie Waldrop keeps re-establishing herself as one of our foremost avant-garde stylists and most original poet-philosophers.