Saturday 14 June 2014

Pleasure in Accuracy


Kevin McNeilly discovers Elise Partridges' 2008 collection Chameleon Hours, and admires what he dubs her mixture of "the serendipitous and the exacting":
Most of the poems in Chameleon Hours are elegies: meditations on loss, on the art of losing. They draw their passing, brief intensities from a heightened awareness of lived material detail, of “small things,” that comes in the wake of absence. Robert Pinsky praises this practice as her “art of noticing”: “Absence and failure are described [in Elise Partridge’s poetry] in a way that takes pleasure in accuracy: a considerable and original accomplishment.” Her poems, for me, evoke much more than mere pleasure, much more than an enjoyment of pretty craft, and her accomplishment is more than considerable: the crisp particularity of her characteristic line engenders a keen pathos in restraint, and unflinchingly confronts the hard expressive limits of her own mortality—“pretty or not,” as she puts it. In “Chemo Side Effects: Vision,” one of her pieces that Pinsky singles out for praise, she notes how there are “So many small things I still want to see”; the modulating vowels distilled from the long-I—the withdrawing, observant subject at the heart of this particular line attenuated into phonemic shivers, i becoming ah-ee, then lightly drawled into aw and i and braided through commonplace consonants, s’s and m’s and t’s—produce a palpable set of articulated, glassy shards on the teeth and tongue, small bursts of sense. Vatic wonder, under Elise Partridge’s pen, doesn’t so much diminish as gain a tensile acuity, a closeness.

1 comment:

Kevin McNeilly said...

Thanks so much for linking to this piece, Carmine. Elise is a tremendous poet, and she deserves as much recognition as possible.