The Tranquilized
Tongue
Eric
Baus. City Lights Books, City Lights Spotlight No. 11, $13.95 US softcover (70p)
ISBN 978-0-87286-616-4
THE
FERAL FILM
The tidal nerves were moon-burnt at
birth. The grass the doves grew inverted the canopy. The stunned deer fished
for glass oxen. The ur-creature’s escape elongated the animals. The statue
stirred its ghost in a jar.
Following
The To Sound (Wave Books, 2004), Turned Droves (Octopus Books, 2009) and Scared Text (Center for Literary
Publishing, 2011), Denver, Colorado poet Eric Baus’ fourth poetry collection, The Tranquilized Tongue is a book-length
suite of short poems that owes much to a French tradition. This is a tradition
that includes, as the back cover tells us, Francis Ponge, Pierre Reverdy and
René Char, a tradition characterized by explorations of ideas, a sense of the
concrete versus the abstract, and the sentence. Extending his ongoing book-length
exploration of the prose poem, there aren’t many poets who work the abstract
book-length fragment in the way that Baus does, or so well, managing an anchor
of concrete sentences that somehow accumulate into something larger and far
more nebulous. The work of American poet Kate Greenstreet comes to mind, as
does the work of Joshua Marie Wilkinson, or Sylvia Legris: three poets who also
manage to stretch out the particulars of a concrete idea and situation through
an accumulated abstraction. Through short, dense poems, Baus manages to utilize
each sentence as a single point, accumulating those points into a far larger shape,
one as much created by Baus as by each reader’s experience.
THE
EGG’S ALIAS
The embers cloaked the sleeping storm.
The photograph of a bomb placed inside a rattled out lightbulb replaced the wind.
The bird-child’s bed was hidden in the chimney. The invisible sisters
collapsed. The mirror forgot what an hourglass was. The pharmacy filled with
sand.
In
a recent interview over at the Touch the
Donkey blog, Baus discusses some of the construction of the current book:
“My newest book, The Tranquilized Tongue,
does contain a handful of true fragments in that they are not fully developed
sentences. Some of that has to do with constraints that I used to write that
book (I tried to write one poem every day, I generally limited myself to the
vocabulary of poems that I’ve already written, and I often used cut-ups as a
way to enliven the raw materials.) Sometimes during the course of writing my
poem for the day, the raw materials I was drawing upon felt nearly exhausted,
so I shifted the scale of the poem to become very, very small to avoid
repeating myself or to change the pace of the book to give the reader space to
rest before being launched into another dense paragraph.” (April 2014)
Purchase
The Tranquilized Tongue HERE.
Reviewer
bio: Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious
capital city, rob mclennan
currently lives in Ottawa. The author of nearly thirty trade books of poetry,
fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, and was
longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012. His most recent titles include notes
and dispatches: essays (Insomniac press, 2014) and The Uncertainty
Principle: stories, (Chaudiere Books, 2014). He regularly posts reviews,
essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com
