Peter Gizzi: Threshold
Songs
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The volume
inhabits the poetic world of the four elements – air, earth, fire & water –
that is also the world of atoms & electrons, particles & waves, DNA
&CGI.
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It is a work of
mourning - from the technology of hospitalised dying:
When those green
lights flash & blink, is that it? When the ‘it’ continues strangely for a
bit, then falls into a line, is it over?
To the mythic
realm of Orpheus, of Thoth & Anubis of the Egyptian death cult, of Charon
and Mercury, of the Bardo Thodol.
Myths of attempted (& failed) rescue & recovery of the dead; of
judgement; of the process of dying & the liminalities of the after-death:
Is there a
world?
Are they still
calling it that?
The after-death of
Bardo – with its lights & colors – that maps onto modern clinical accounts
of the brain closing down – is also the poetical world of this volume – but cut
with folk tales in their multiple versions.
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Between the
dedication ‘called back’ and the epigraph from Beckett (‘a voice comes to one in
the dark’), the volume situates itself at the start in the liminal space of
grieving and haunting – the two-way movement between our yearning for the dead
– and the dead haunting us: ‘felt presences/ behind the hole/ in the day’. Gaps
& absences, but also revenants, ghosts, memories – the otherwise present.
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At the same time,
the poetry apprehends another threshold: ‘death we carry/ within us’: the
nature of living in time:
now that you’re
gone
& I’m here
or now
that you’re here
&
I’m gone or now
that you’re gone
&
I’m gone what
did we learn?
In short,
negotiating the facts of ‘time-based carbon life’: a relationship to mortality
that is a way of valuing life.
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A childhood world
of snowglobes, Pinocchio, cartoons as trace. At the same time, what seems often
like a non-specific location that crystallises momently as New
England through specifying lexis. A planetary awareness of ‘deep
space’ – ‘stars scattered’, ‘solar wind’, ‘planet spin’ – Pascall’s terrifying
interstellar spaces – but also a vantage point – like the posthumous
perspective – a distance – like the mediated vision of lens & telescope.
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