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Word
Group
Reviews
Book Forum:
“Following
her well-aimed Annotated ‘Here’ and
Selected Poems, Welish here sets out to describe
both the way in which the mind apprehends abstract notions
and how rigorously it performs this task. She challenges
“prettiness,” for example—as it is
embodied in novels, bucolic landscapes, portrayals of great passion, even cigarette packaging—at
an almost feverish pitch, working against a poem’s
anticipated flow even as she moves it along with jazzy
verve.”
Boston Review:
“At
it’s core, Welish’s work illustrates how
the truly creative act is always critical, and how the
writer’s act is akin to the reader’s. .
. .It is the reader who must conspire with the well-wrought
openness of Marjorie Welish’s poetry to ensure
its status as—in Pound’s formulation—‘news
that stays news.’”
The Constant Critic:
“Welish
is genuinely and inventively concerned with setting
out and articulating—both in the rhetorical and
the mechanical sense—the functions of poetic syntax.
And unlike the morbid experimental clinicians the so-called
traditionalists conjure to haunt the dreams of otherwise
curious and open-minded readers, Welish never loses
the pleasure or the musicianship of what she studies.”
Jacket:
“Welish
is always aware of the structure of thought, the architecture
of it; she situates her writing perspective at its doors
and windows, as though always on the verge of escaping
presupposed or given grounds, constantly reminding us
that there is an outside to this structure, that it
is embedded in a sinking swamp of assumptions.”
The Midwest Book Review:
“Award-winning
poet, painter, and critic Marjorie Welish presents Word
Group, a collection of inspirational lyric poems
that fuse raw imagination with dynamic patterns of rhythm,
dialogue, spacing, and descriptive imagery. A refreshing
window into a unique style of using words as a canvas
to impress the critical struggles of daily survival
and aspirations beyond.”
Splendid:
“In
Word Group, there is an abundance of word-play,
which is not only enjoyable as mental exercise, but
also gives an almost sensual pleasure when read aloud.”
Esther Press:
“One
word or phrase will recur, sometimes twisted, between
sections of writing. . . . The feeling one has when
these gestures occur is often a haunting, an echoing,
a remembering, if barely so, of a thread of thought.
And this is what makes [Welish's] poems so daring, I
think, as she relies on typically minor details, asides,
or a string of asides, to create the boundaries of a
poem.”
Norma
Cole:
"In Word Group, the poem is a mind-reader,
beginning at some point to consider how it works. Implicate
type without token. A kind of sonic orchestration takes
place, out of the waves, making durable form of the
registration itself. Registration of conventions. Threshold
of registration. Picture near-rhyme and off-rhyme, their
rhetoric framing and containing difference, catching
difference in order to study its motives, if it had
motives. The idea of order. Apposite. Unreasonable.
The rhythmic level is available unfetishized otherness
held in common."
Michael
Palmer:
"Very few American poets explore the mechanisms
of lyric voicing, poetic syntax and poetic logic with
the determined focus of Marjorie Welish. We witness
the dynamic play of likeness and difference, paradox
and disjunction, while embarking on a path of startling
turns or tropes. Space seems to reconfigure itself as
we proceed, revealing new dimensions and folds. Space
of the page, the room, the stanza. Fresh air pouring
in."
Also available by this author:
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