The Violence of the Morning: Poems

by Calvin Bedient

This innovative new collection of poems by Cal Bedient is Nabokovian in its artifice, its fluency, and its scope―from Kant to Jaqueline Du Pres's Elgar, from Mother Goose to the Upanishads, from poems after the paintings of Corot, Monet, Matisse, and Klee to extended inquiries into the complexities of sexual and other relationships. The poems take up the task of asking what joy is available in the dark and terrifying waves of disease, broken love, and death. The persona voicings are varied, odd, and memorable; and the poems vary widely in their feel, their rhythm, their typology. Everywhere the language is outrageously wet and vivid―sliced orange language. Though the poems often take the form of couplets, quatrains, or some other repeatable structure, the results are daringly unexpected, irrational, compelling, astonishingly beautiful, and moving.

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Paperback

First published May 13, 2002

Reviews

[Robert Beveridge · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cal Bedient, The Violence of the Morning (University of Georgia Press, 2002)

According to both Goodreads and Amazon, I first read Cal Bedient's The Violence of the Morning back in October 2005. I don't remember doing so, and judging by my review back then, I liked it okay, but wasn't overly thrilled with it. Six years later, I picked it up again, and I have discovered more evidence for something I have always believed: what you're reading immediately surrounding a book seems to have an effect on how you perceive that book. Before the first reading, I'd recently finished Twenty-Seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit, Timothy Donnelly's 2003 collection that not only made my top reads of the year list for 2005, but made my favorite books of the decade list. Many things would have paled in comparison. This time around, The Violence of the Morning was the first book of poetry I'd picked up in a month, since finishing George Bilgere's The Good Kiss (very good, but not his best work), and I got a lot more out of it than I did last time.

“To the cow whopped by an oar of the sun: out at sea, wet and
--wildly wide, the big burn.

With the missus up in the flowingly written. That was the breath
--of the black paper.

To Thelma: I looked for you in the rattlesnake colors of Grand
--Coulee. Found your hat, a square piece of turf.”
(–“A Short Ailment. Appointed with a Swarm, Mossy, Low”)

(sorry about the double-dashes, Amazon would strip out the indents were there nothing there.)

If you're asking yourself what it all means, you're probably in the wrong place. This is not poetry about meaning, this is poetry about sound. If it helps you understand, think of this as My Bloody Valentine lyrics. (Kevin Shields was notorious for mixing the vocals down low enough to make them unintelligible, stressing that the voice was “just another instrument”.) It doesn't have to make sense, it just has to have the right syllables in the right places to unlock the proper magic. Bedient, in my estimation, does this pretty darned well. **** ½

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

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