The Wind, Master Cherry, The Wind

by Larissa Szporluk

Haunting and spare, The Wind, Master Cherry, The Wind is obsessed with fate’s fickle nature. Propelled by internal rhyme, these lyric poems draw on fairy tales and fables, stories from the Bible and from Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, their characters blown hither and thither by mythic winds—but -inevitably, toward an awareness of mortality.Inside the Dog-FishWide as the church, the sea, the cavern,
hard as a rock, a tree, a geyser, tight
as the spot of birth, hot as the furnace,
serpent, witch, plain as the ego, primitive,
tomb, loose as a swallow’s whirling torso,
fiery vertebra—madre terribile, mother
of agony, atony, urge, providing a passage,
a sabbath, excuse, symbol of charm
gone darkly sour, emotional windbag
pricked by the light of the luna cornuta,
spitting up trinkets and bottles of rum,
and pages of books, and chunks of men.
"Mark Strand describes Edward Hopper’s work as being informed by two imperatives, one that urges us to continue and the other that compels us to stay. Such is the experience of reading The Wind, Master Cherry, The Wind, Larissa Szporluk’s demanding and brilliant new we are both urged -forward and held back by its mysterious intellection. -Szporluk’s work is about what can be known and what cannot be, what can be divulged and what must be withheld. The Wind, Master Cherry, The Wind is fraught with such taut pleasures. This is poetry both luscious and rigorous."—Lynn Emanuel

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2003

About the author

Larissa Szporluk was raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan and earned degrees at the University of Michigan, the University of California-Berkeley, and the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns fellow. Her books of poetry include Dark Sky Question (1998), which won the Barnard Poetry Prize; Isolato (2000), winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize; The Wind, Master Cherry, the Wind (2003); Embryos and Idiots (2007); and Traffic with Macbeth (2011). She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and currently teaches at Bowling Green State University.

Reviews

[İpek]

was not expecting all the pinocchio imagery

[Kristin]

Brilliant! Musical and lush.

[Nicholas Rombes]

"What would I be / if I hadn't been pitted against you?" (from p. 39)