From Eva Heisler’s “Drawing Water”
K’s little book is three pages.
Each page is filled with an inky circle.
Each ragged circle is a period taken from a poem by Halldór Laxness
and magnified until it fills the page.
K. tells me he wanted to see how little he could do and still make a
book of poetry.
□
…a stone may be round or angular, polished or rough, cracked
like an ill-glazed teacup, or as broad as the breast of a hero.
It may be as flaky as a wafer, as powdery as a field puff-ball;
it may be fused like a glass bottle,
or crystallized like hoar-frost,
or veined like a leaf:
look at the stone, and try to forget
how you were told to “do a stone.”
□
The line break is hesitation or resistance or acquiescence
or a tiny rip in the mesh of a screen door.
Lines may multiply as cracks across the surface of an old painting
or lines may measure and slice like a butcher’s cleaver.
White synonyms.
K’s aberrant periods revoke transparency.
—
This selection comes from Eva Heisler’s book Drawing Water, available from Noctuary Press! Purchase your copy here!
Eva Heisler is a Maryland-born poet and art critic who lived in Iceland for many years and now resides in Germany. Reading Emily Dickinson in Icelandic (Kore Press, 2013) features a series of prose poems that explore failures of translation, the materiality of voice, and the relationship of language to perception. The book-length poem Drawing Water (Noctuary Press, 2013) meditates on line (conceptual line, descriptive line, expressive line, and found line) in an attempt to rethink the poetic line. Vocabulary Landscape, a work-in progress, explores the language of landscape description; an excerpt was recently published in Asymptote.
Leslie LaChance‘s poems have appeared in Quiddity, JMWW, the Best of the Net Anthology, Apple Valley Review, The Greensboro Review, Juked, The Birmingham Poetry Review, Slow Trains, Free Lunch, Chronogram, and Appalachian Journal. She also edits Mixitini Matrix: A Journal of Creative Collaboration. Her chapbook, How She Got That Way, appears in the quartet volume Mend & Hone from Toadlily Press.
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