Form from Form
by Christopher Bolin
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Pub Date Sep 10 2018 | Archive Date Sep 15 2018
University of Iowa Press | University Of Iowa Press
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Description
“Was it a crater or a sinkhole?” asks a voice in one of the mysterious, wonderstruck poems in Christopher Bolin’s Form from Form, whose cadences modulate with the energies of form-making, deformation, and elusive reformation. Natural forms and forms of human manufacture, forms of absence and those of urgent desire construct and deconstruct each other in Bolin’s singular music, which blends unnerving plainness and obliqueness, the childlike and the alien.
As their sites drift from workers’ camps to city squares, isolated coasts to windswept plains, the poems in Form from Form trace a map of a fragmented ecology, dense with physical detail of altered landscapes and displaced populations. In tones of austere beauty and harsh discordance, these poems provide a “field guide to luminescent things,” a visionary fretwork of the possibilities and impossibilities of faith in the present moment.
Advance Praise
“Where is the stability in a world that is a victim of itself? Thomas Merton came to mind as I was reading this book, his being a person whose cold eye can be cast on everything in sight while his heart is all fire and depth. I think these marvelous poems wrestle with contradiction and so bring us to the possibility of change.”—Fanny Howe, author, The Needle’s Eye
“Chris Bolin has an expert sense of the line and a very keen feel for the poetic image, constructing poems that move with a calm and stately radiance. In its austere tableaux and impersonal but poetically authoritative language, Bolin’s work brings to mind Saint-John Perse’s Anabasis, creating an overall and haunting impression of mankind’s struggle with the material world as he tries to tame, engineer, modify, exploit, find a place in, and save it. Bolin is a poet’s poet, and I expect I’ll keep this beautiful book near at hand to be inspired by its marvels often.” —Geoffrey Nutter, author, Cities at Dawn
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781609386047 |
| PRICE | $19.95 (USD) |
| PAGES | 94 |
Links
Featured Reviews
Joseph S, Reviewer
Form from Form by Christopher Bolin is the poet's second collection of poetry. Bolin teaches writing at the College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University. He is also the author of Ascension Theory.
Kuhl House Poets releases collections in fall and it is described by the University of Iowa Press as:
This provocative series reawakens readers to a fresh consideration of the possibilities of language and feeling by publishing work that is formally and verbally inventive, adventurous work that takes its own path outside established routes of either traditions or experimental poetry.
Form From Form perfectly fits this description. The Kuhl House releases are usually more difficult poetry and usually supply several moments of revelation. Form From Form made me think from first seeing the title. It is usually form that follows function. Reading through I began to think that if form derives from form might this not be like Plato allegory? The poet is describing form while viewing the ideal in an attempt to relay perfection in our imperfect words. Bolin's work certainly did provide several instances when he perfectly captured a moment.
The work is rich with imagery:
The viewers in the triptych shadows breaking into sequences
of expressions—
into tableaus
of arriving
a thousand years too late to save them from themselves
~Crowd Control
"Manuscript" plays heavily on the ovine. From the vellum, to the recording of the word of The Lamb, to the "smoothing the tufted pages of the beast" the path is clearly marked and followed. The poet moves from fishermen to factories and might even touch upon the uncertainty principle. Rich in imagery and complex in form Bolin delivers an interesting adventure in words that glimpse beyond the shadows on the wall.
