Anne Blonstein - to be continued

Paperback, 86pp, 8.5x5.5ins

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From her first book, the blue pearl (2003), the reader senses in Anne Blonstein’s work a sharp analogy between words and stones, between sequences of words and strings that shine. In an early poem in this new volume, a tribute to Kurt Schwitters is strung as 'an unsingable necklace'. Anne Blonstein's poetry is difficult, but it is difficult in the way in which stones are — they are not transparent, nor do they point or explain or lead onwards. The power of precious stones is to test and challenge light, to make light behave differently, originally. By refraction and reflection, stones gleam and entrance, and show us not themselves but the possibilities of light. So words in these poems, whose forms sometimes reach the crystalline (where gem coheres with geometry and gematria), will change in sense and shape and sound according to the particular sign (or space) that catches the eye, or the breath. One line, one phrase, can resonate and reverberate, in memory’s hearing and in the shapings of tongue and lips. — Charles Lock

to be continued consists of three sections with different principles of sequencing. In the short poems of the opening section, 'mistress of the crazy chromosome', the Jewish date on which they were written assigns the word number for each stanza. The following long poem, 'thou shalt not kill', orders itself around the Hebrew letters of the sixth commandment. In the concluding section, which lends its name to the volume, a group of love poems are arranged and set against the incoherence and trials of desire for an absent lover.

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