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Category Archives: Metaphor
Forest Sorcery
Robin Skelton, particularly in Landmarks, offers us poetry which is laden with wonderful West Coast atmospherics and sly transmogrifications. One striking passage describes flora in a manner attuned to how simple particulars seize imagination all the while making us brave … Continue reading →
Crumbs of Fire
In a prose poem from The Whole Night, Coming Home Roo Borson offers a set of sentences that remind one of the ghazal form. The sentence clusters hang separately like couplets and they resonate — there is some inkling of … Continue reading →
Whither the Way
Ernest Renan. “What is a Nation?” A nation’s existence is, if you will pardon the metaphor, a daily plebiscite, just as an individual’s existence is a perpetual affirmation of life. If a nation is like an individual, is it too … Continue reading →
Able Metaphors
Adam Mars-Jones “Cinematically Challenged” collected in Blind Bitter Happiness So when cinema wants to show a state of mind, it tends to show a state of body instead. Films with a blindness theme tend to be about trust, films with … Continue reading →
Treeworks
The metaphor works its way through time in Wanda Campbell’s poem “Family Tree” from Haw [Thorn] my father’s family is as clear as the sap his father squeezed from the trees each sweet spring his mother only four at her … Continue reading →
Exemplifications
H.D. in The Wise Sappho mentions the “tortured and torturing sea”. A befitting description of any writing encounter with language where the voice becomes shaped like driftwood that snags upon the mind. And so for day 128 21.04.2007
Restorative
Barry Lopez in Winter Count has a piece that is a portrait. “The Lover of Words” is described as understanding the power of words to draw forth feeling and to mesmerize. He understood how words healed. A slow reading that … Continue reading →
Auricular
In some circles two English words now mark different but related formations which may or may not correspond to a possible distinction in French between labyrinthe and dédale. It effects how one reads Susan Sontag’s parenthetical remark in “Under the … Continue reading →
Gatherings
Joy Harjo has a line in “The Field of Miracles” in The woman who fell from the sky: poems that opens the imagination to the strength of attentions to particulars: the leaf a codex for the season of memory The … Continue reading →