Matt's review
American Spikenard (Iowa Poetry Prize) by Sarah Vap (Goodreads author!)
Vap sort of pre-empts a particular kind of review of her book by stating in one of the poems late in this book that she is tired of being called difficult. So I won't do that.
The poems here are dense and impacted, as if each one is a new kind of form, and each one requires special tools and approaches, visionary insights to really penetrate. It makes this book, full of poems that on the page are very spare (I think only one goes beyond a page, and Vap's line usually isn't that long) an incredibly dense read. But I never doubted the sophistication of Vap's project-- there's a solid, lucid core on the level of the phrase, a confidence that yes, language can do this, too, that is really invigorating.
These are poems that take a little time. But what else do you have to do, update your facebook profile?
The poems here are dense and impacted, as if each one is a new kind of form, and each one requires special tools and approaches, visionary insights to really penetrate. It makes this book, full of poems that on the page are very spare (I think only one goes beyond a page, and Vap's line usually isn't that long) an incredibly dense read. But I never doubted the sophistication of Vap's project-- there's a solid, lucid core on the level of the phrase, a confidence that yes, language can do this, too, that is really invigorating.
These are poems that take a little time. But what else do you have to do, update your facebook profile?
Um, updating facebook profile takes time!
