Vitreous

by David Ray Vance

Winner of the Del Sol Press 2005 Poetry Prize, David Ray Vance's poetry collection combines science and art gloriously. Mary Jo Bang, the Prize Judge, has this to say about VITREOUS: "Part rewritten 1934 medical text, part Keatsian reflection, this is the logical offspring of the long-awaited meeting of science and art; a marriage of equals where each half maintains its primary allegiance: the poetic to the common lyrical language of emotion and memory, the medical to its narrowly appropriated lexicon of intraocular, cornea, and Placido's disc. Mr. Vance has woven these two competing word streams into a meditation on sight and risk. Think of it as an item in the cupboard of the scientifically sublime. Think of Ronald Johnson's ARK. VITREOUS is utterly fascinating in its reach, and exquisitely tender. And important, because it answers again today's recurrent question, Can form be further broken and still be a poem? The answer (of course) is yes." * "The Korean character for "citizen" is based upon the image of an eye pierced by an arrow. The citizen, thus, is one whose vision has been wounded by the state; how can we see clearly when we're in the midst, in the thick of things? David Ray Vance's startling and rewarding debut is a kind of exhibition--a virtual museum of poetic and found texts--concerned with the vulnerability of the eye, the I's aperture, the world's window, the self's permeable edge." --Mark Doty "VITREOUS dazzles in the way the first pictures of the earth must have dazzled. This amazing collection exists in the vast distance between the body and the body perceived. Each poem makes alien both the form and function of our most essential organs through its innate understanding that we will succumb as easily to pollutants as we do to that caressing hand on our cheek. David Ray Vance, in this stunning book, offers a clinical yet intimate look at our modes of perceiving our haunting and vulnerable physicality." --Claudia Rankine

Genres: Poetry

100 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Heather · Rating 3 out of 5]

My response to these poems was more positive after hearing the author read in one of my classes. I asked him about the footnotes and the more personal prose text, which I found more engaging than the rest of the text, and specifically if he considered swapping the words above with the footnotes. He explained that he was interested in where the reader's eyes might end up on the page. Take note: Many of the poems dealt with eyes and sight. His comments made me think about the geography of poetry.

[zaCk S · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not my style of poetry construction, but the ideas or well-organized and appropriate to the style of the poetry. the figures of medical implements are interesting, but their reproductions in the book are so small on the page that their effectiveness is reduced.