Reviews
Symmetry
by Laura Moriarty
From Publisher's Weekly:
"...The surfaces of these poems shiver with a tensile strength. Although the language is simple and the topics vaguely commonplace (in the manner of Francis Ponge or Pierre Reverdy), Moriarty, here in her fourth book, manages to array across a single plane a poetry of sublime beauty, bewitching and strange. She invokes Marcel Duchamp's definition of symmetry to explain the book's title, and more than once the reader will be reminded of the artist's works on glass: "Painted sky/ Glass with vines wound/ Hell or heaven also painted/ Or silver lemon peeled." Although occasionally Moriarty stumbles into false profundities, her otherwise steadfast adherence to a quiet language builds a fine case for how complexities can be found in the simplest of arrangements. And the book's brilliant closing statement, "Diagram," tells exactly whereof this poetry is born: "inside all of one part/ Of one day going on ..."
From American Book Review:
"...Laura Moriarty's
most recent poems continue to investigate fruitful terrain perhaps
first mapped in Persia (1983), which co-won The Poetry Center Book
Award in that year. . . . The poet's style is a sort of cyber-to-Steinian
array of voices, favoring anachronism mixing medieval or ancient
world imagery with contemporary or futuristic vistas. . . . Quite a
few of the pieces in Symmetry are prose poems, which read like minimalist
fictions. . . . Details and images hint at a context, but the settings
for {Moriarty's} poems ultimately turnout to be unplaceable places
that pull on the mind and linger with the persistence of half-remembered
dreams. The reader often finds herself pleasantly adrift in the
Floating World, without possibility of purchase. Laura Moriarty
writes poetry for those of us who don't live in the solved world..."
From Small Press, a Magazine of Independent Publishing:
"...Moriarty's
poems engage the reader in a play of question-as-answer, perception
as a state ofbeing, continually moving forward. Language neither 'shows'
(imagistic) nor 'tells' (prose). Rather, language is the riving
engine ofthought keeping poet and reader both alert at the wheel--the
kind of collaborative perception associated with visual works by
makers of abstract films and optical artists. Moriarty addresses
both muse and reader: 'We are in businesstogether.' Wit strums
the strings of her lyre. Include in her antecedents, Blake and
Stein. Moriarty's best work tingles the brain with unexpected word,phrase,
or image. Suitably, there is no table of contents, because the
poems move without closure, just as thought never closes itself off..."