And Her Soul Out Of Nothing (Brittingham Prize in Poetry) Review

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(More customer reviews)I've never read a poet who writes like Olena Kalytiak Davis.I suppose if some crazy geneticist managed to meld the minds of Poe, Longfellow, Ogden Nash, Dylan Thomas, Gwendolyn Brooks, Stevie Smith, and Sylvia Plath, then a writer similar to Davis might appear, but that's about what it would take.
She uses language unlike anyone else -- as a playground, a laboratory, a room with rubber walls.Her imagery is idiosyncratic, but always powerful, always somehow just right.Her rhythms pull her words to and fro, clattering and clashing together, bouncing off each other, bounding and rebounding across landscapes of dreams and portents.With any other poet, I'd quote some lines, but that wouldn't do Davis justice, for her poems need elbow room and time for their wonders to accumulate.With any other poet, I'd tell you, If you like X, you'll like this one -- but for Davis there is no X.She is her own equation, sui generis.
Few collections of poetry have so much to offer, so much depth and substance, so much sustenance for the reader ready to listen.

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And Her Soul Out of Nothing is, quite simply, unlike any other collection I can remember reading in recent literature. There is an eerie precision to her worklike the delicate discernment of a brain surgeons scalpelthat renders each moment in both its absolute clarity and ultimate transitory fragility. Her language is quirky in the very best sense of that word; her use of syntax is brilliant.Rita Dove, Judge, Citation for the 1997 Brittingham Prize in PoetryA treasury of broken meditations and chipped singing, moments of insight and yearning appearing like bits of statuary plowed up in a field, perhaps more beautiful for their sudden unlikely emergence. Olena Kalytiak Daviss poems find evidence of the spirit everywhere, in laundromats, in parking lots and frozen landscapes, in the panic of birds.Dean Young

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