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A Frame of the Book

by Erin Mouré

In recent years, Erin Mouré’s poetry has had the reputation of being a kind of playground for grad-school students. As the title suggests, her eighth book of poetry, A Frame of the Book, is heavily informed by that branch of self-reflexive post-modernism dealing with the nature of syntax and meaning, and how the two do and don’t work together. Readers who enjoyed the poetic and academic loop-the-loops of Mouré’s previous book, Search Procedures, will probably read this one with great relish.

Mouré’s poems are often complicated and sometimes inaccessible, testing the reader’s attention span with red herrings, nonsequiturs, and labyrinthine threads of logic. Most often, though, this happens when the reader is trying too hard to read the poem. Ludwig, a speaker in one of Mouré’s dialogue sequences, explains how new readers of Mouré’s poetry should approach the texts: “My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them – as steps – to climb up beyond them.” (We must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after we have climbed up it.)

Mouré quite possibly has more command over the language than any other poet writing experimental or avant-garde poetry in this country. She stands well above the crowd as a real innovator, a true communicator (not simply an insistent huckster of lukewarm Dadaist leftovers), and for this she is to be commended. Her new poems here are so often peppered with flashes of lyrical beauty, sexual freedom, compassion, and tenderness. Best of all, none of it feels phony.

As scholarly as it is mellifluous, A Frame of the Book may not be the best entry point for readers new to Mouré’s poetry, but it is a worthy and vital addition to her impressive body of work.

 

Reviewer: Paul Vermeersch

Publisher: House of Anansi

DETAILS

Price: $19.95

Page Count: 144 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 0-88784-632-7

Released: May

Issue Date: 1999-8

Categories: Poetry