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Tax-exempt? | Drawing of a Swan Before Memory How do we experience the world before memory, before language, before the senses have separated, or before the concepts of "you" and "I" have been distinguished? Laynie Browne investigates both the limits and potential of such an inchoate world in her new book of poetry, Drawing of a Swan Before Memory. In a series of elegant prose poems, Browne guides the reader through the intricate development of human perception, where the haunting vastness of childhood slowly gives way to the defining features of adult cognition. Subtly nuanced verse constructs a world of color before sight and utterance before language-all the while aware that, ironically, language itself makes this ethereal world possible. Laynie Browne is the author of several previous collections of poetry, including Pollen Memory and The Agency of Wind. Among her numerous honors and fellowships, she is a three-time recipient of the Gertrude Stein Award in Innovative American Poetry. She lives in Oakland, California. April 2005 ISBN 0820327298 paper • $16.95 80 pp. • 5.5 x 8.5 in.A volume in the seriesThe Contemporary Poetry Series "Laynie Browne's work places her amongst the loveliest natural historians of perception: Goethe, Bergson, Lucretius. Like them she knows that 'description becomes a portrait of not an object but a transference.' The indetermination and synaesthesia in perceiving here find their register, locating the poem in what remains unbound, to the side of the image. This same oblique site spontaneously invents the ethical, showing that to describe is to honour an unknowable receiver. These poems gently host our plenitude." —Stacy Doris, author of Conference"With Bachelard's 'surveyor's map of (his) lost fields' as her memory ground, Browne seeks-through the figures of child, swan, and lover-to recover a wholeness from holographic splittings of recovered film, minute interference patterns in which the hood of childhood is poised as mythic antidote to the lover's body, leaving us with momentary apertures that allow our human longing for permanence to reveal itself." —Kathleen Fraser"Laynie Browne's portrait of the acquisition of language is both an inscription of love and a description of arrival. It reveals a great divide between forming and having, embracing formation in loving detail. But before memory, an image has no awareness of itself as image. Before memory, a drawing of a swan is lost in its own blindness. The ambitious project L. Browne pursues here is to trace this innocence, this pure voice, as it unfolds, as it betrays its blindness and becomes experience.."- Robert Mittenthal, Golden Handcuffs Review Vol. 1 No. 6, 2005-2006"In Drawing of a Swan Before Memory, Browne repeatedly asks her reader to go to the place of newly forming perceptions and verbalizations before they harden into determinate sense. This poetical exploration is an ethical adventure because Browne suggests it is in these subliminal or partial formations that connection with other human beings and a larger world occurs. The voulme's six meditations frequently focus around the interactions between parent and child, although to name these as such, over identifies the actors that produce the subtle liminalities between knowing and not knowing, observing and remembering, perceiving and languaging that are Browne's subjects. In this volume, Browne radically revises any conventional sense of such highly sentimental markers as home, parent, child, while studying their centrality in a life."-Jeanne Hueving, Golden Handcuffs Review Vol.1 No. 6, 2005-2006 |
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