The Powerhouse of Language
| Autor: | Edward Falco |
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| Rok vydání: | 1992 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | The Iowa Review. 22:190-192 |
| ISSN: | 2330-0361 0021-065X |
| DOI: | 10.17077/0021-065x.4173 |
| Popis: | IN HER MOST RECENT COLLECTION of poems, Alice Fulton uses her impressive verbal resources and dizzying mastery of form to explore the powers of congress. As she did in Palladium, Fulton allows the mul tiple meanings of a word (in this case, congress) to work as controlling metaphors for the collection. One of the powers of the United States Con gress, for example, is to wage war; and several poems ?"OVERLORD" and "Home Fires, 1943," most notably?take up the subject of warfare. In the largest sense, however, in the sense that informs most of these poems, the powers of congress are the powers that generate from coming together, from union ?especially sexual union. Exploring those powers of congress prompts Fulton to explore fundamental questions of being and origin. In Fulton's poems, humans are "towers/ of blood and ignorance" and any attainment of order is a "sculpted composure" that resists the "planless cascade" at the center of things. For Fulton, everything is something made and in time remade, from the planets to the mountains to the words we speak and the poems we tell. All things generated by congress form and reform. In this universe, there is no such creature as permanence, and our human desire for constancy leads only to trouble. In the title poem, Fulton begins by describing a universe in flux. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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