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About The Book
What erodes here are borders between language and land, between experience and experienced, between what can be known and what can be said. It’s a remarkable experience and the reader is left with more than the sum of their senses.
-Jack Davis
Seemingly simultaneously hewn from granite and whispered from the gossamer-glot of glaciers, the poems in Erodes On Air swiftly persuades the reader to slow down and take another look … at everything we thought we knew of language. Mark Goodwin’s innovative breaking and re-arrangement of words reveals by disrupting the presumed flow, and makes the mind revert to revaluation, much in the same way a solo climber’s mind sums up options with fingertips, calculates grit and grip and tests tentatively for the way forward.
Goodwin’s poetry offers a new approach to reading poetry, one which mirrors adventurous route-finding. The brave reader finds his own passages between the poet’s lines, as snowmelt might in the geological phenomena of split and slipping slabs of stone, finding patterns of sedimentary strata in disrupted lines, which make of words diaphanous, multi-textured things, things we know but experience anew … and it is in that split-moment of open mystery as the mind scrambles for purchase, the reader arrives at a splintering of meaning and expectation, a technique which lends mystery to the journey of reading, the poem opening up before you as the pathless wilderness does the holy wanderer without map.
To those uninitiated into the way this added poetic device functions and the gold it offers, there may be momentary discomfort. In Goodwin’s spare and minimal lines, the same unknowing moments of the rock-climber for whom the next finger or toehold seem elusive, are experienced again and again. There is a danger in these poems which only exists in the mind, and one may be tempted to turn back and go no further. But those who persevere, who accustom themselves to the vulnerability of uncertainty, of not-knowing and still seeking, scrambling, reaching for the next coherent thing that feels right, will experience so much more than if these lines were rendered as prose sentences laid out squared as the polished steps of the capital building. These are not monuments with brass cast signs, these are mountain moments lived through the mind.
