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1997 |
The
Silhouette of the Bridge
"The
Silhouette of the Bridge (Memory Stand- Ins) is a beautifully spare
and inventive work of reflection on the elusive nature of memory, perception
and experience. As we would expect from Keith Waldrop, it is suffused
with a particular humanity and an appreciation for the absurd, even the
grotesque, in daily life. The rhythmic apposition of prose and poetry
brings to mind freedom, alertness and the quality of distillation in Basho's
classic travel sketches. With his quietly precise sense of modulation
and his unerring gaze, Waldrop remains one of the vital and requisite
semi-secret presences in American letters." "'What I see, what I know,
takes the form of my knowing, my seeing. That is why I doubt most of
what I find most certain, why the rationality of the world appalls me.'
In The Silhouette of the Bridge (Memory Stand-Ins), Keith Waldrop never
trespasses across Wittgenstein's threshold of the unsayable, yet he
brings us often to the shadows cast between terror and calm, memory
and fact, body and soul. Writing with his usual consummate clarity,
Waldrop has given us a meditation with the intimate thrall of a bedtime
story. As if the sublime were 'merest hunger.'" |
