Corked

Catriona Strang expertly fabricates her own reality in poems that explore the female condition and respond to Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. In a powerful and rare display of poetic ingenuity, Strang situates classical themes of existentialism, memory, time, and the role of women in two clarifying contexts: the metaphorical mailbox of Proust and the speaker’s own body, as understood in geographical and geological terms. we need not gulf doubt nor gist-pierce our place whatever grip or drib we might or mean Dear Proust, / You’ve been dawning on me. Gradually, by the charm of all your explanations, our lives have come to be constituted through art. We have made several realities, far beyond the reach of terrible conservative eyes, which grow greater, or are illuminated. Consequence really lives thus, I mean all the time.