“The Art of Suspension: The Poetry of Marianne Boruch” by Shari Wagner
photo by Will Dunlap
Poet Marianne Boruch appears as a special feature in Indiana Poet Laureate Shari Wagner’s Through the Sycamores:
The Art of Suspension: The Poetry of Marianne Boruch
There’s so much to admire in a Marianne Boruch poem–where to start? I love the surprising metaphors; the complexity of ideas; the enjambment of lines that leave me slightly off kilter and in suspense; the intimate relationship between sound, sense, and form. Maybe what I love most is Marianne’s passion for the act of seeing, for surveying the world–up close, from a distance, or in the wings. She raises the camera, the binoculars or the stereopticon. In one poem she notes how her son peers at the “enormous eye” of a horse, and in another she adopts the perspective of a hundred-year-old cadaver, head wrapped in towels, who views her own dismemberment. She ventures into the eagle-eyed perch of a virtual bombardier, one who hones in through the remote sensing device of a drone. In Marianne’s poems, the act of looking has many dimensions, including the ethical.
The importance of seeing is reinforced here by the poet’s original watercolors (artwork never before exhibited). . . . continue reading here.
