Aufgabe 6 Raymond L. Bianchi Review

Meteoric Flowers by Elizabeth Willis *

Raymond L. Bianchi “A Poem is a Meteor” – WALLACE STEVENS

The above epigraph appropriately frames poet Elizabeth Willis’s newest book Meteoric Flowers, which is crafted like a Bavarian stained glass window with the blues and reds radiating as luminously as possible. Fusing two great avant-garde traditions—on the one hand the concentrated and restrained lyric of Wallace Stevens; on the other the sprawling range of crazy Ezra Pound––Meteoric Flowers offers us a poetry that is crisp and visionary. Divided in four cantos, the book culls from some unusual sources, particularly Erasmus Darwin’s botanical-poetic writings. Darwin’s work––as well as the Pre-Raphaelites whose work has been ignored for so long––is reclaimed from English-class hell to to illuminate these poems: I am almost asleep in it. You, over there, constabular trees. Your hand on my wastedness. Your hand on my stem. (“In Flowers Concealed”)

Willis’s usage of botanical and pastoral images and terms is stark, surprising, and refreshing. She also favors some words that are not in wide parlance anymore, like “porridge” and “mirth,” which tips off an appreciation for the past, and creates a sense of being between time. If being interested in the , year old history of poetry, if being charmed by the classics might put a poet at risk of losing her nerve, Willis shatters the thought. Like H.D. or Anne Carson, Willis engages with and rejuvenates literary history within the context of the continually evolving present. Many books of prose poems move away from the lyric and its focused constraint, and move more towards a multi-genre sense of writing or aim to create micro-stories. Willis avoids this terrain, and like Rosmarie Waldrop before her, favors the prose poem less for acrobatics and more for profundity. In the first canto in the poem “The Steam Engine” she wonders: Have we overstayed our party in the heavenly city or are we spilling through its gates trying not to be trampled?

Amazing. I had to put the book down and reflect on the lectio divina of this poem and wonder why more poetry is not as awe filled as this book. The spirit of this work, the breadth, the respect for the exploratory spirit, history and innovation are flecked through the poems like brilliant crystals amid the mud, showing bold examples of what is possible, what might dare to be. 244

In the poem “Near and More Near” she writes: We’re so close to the ocean I can taste it, like the volcanic in Picasso. A hand fit precisely over a mouth. I know about the thighbone, but what’s this connected to? A skirt trailing off into scorpion silver at the edge of L.A. Compare this with the habits of the wife of Bath, her passing breezes, the stolen pear, tallied for change, tailed to the last, her Spanish clock. This star plane is mechanical it’s having on us. What long teeth you have.

What Willis does in Meteoric Flowers is akin to what Italian Renaissance architects did with ruined Roman buildings. She takes the fine pieces, the cornices, columns and doorjambs and uses them as starting points for new ways of thinking and creating. Like a palace enveloped by a fine and well-tended garden, Willis fuses Stevens’ sense of taut craftedness with Pound’s desire for “newness” and innovation. The new architecture here is spectacular, something truly worth sitting with and breathing in.

BOOK INFO

Meteoric Flowers, Elizabeth Willis Wesleyan University Press,  Paperback,  pages $ . I S B N : ---

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