cover image The Annotated Here and Selected Poems

The Annotated Here and Selected Poems

Marjorie Welish. Coffee House Press, $14.95 (148pp) ISBN 978-1-56689-098-4

In a more than 20-year career as a rigorous experimentalist, Welish has developed an admirably careful poetic, constructing winning free-verse proofs that show language to be just an object that describes other objects, like boxes, paintings and walls. To objectify words and phrases, Welish often places ""scare quotes"" around them, making a sort of tough, lovely, funny math out of mental and social life: ""As chair is to table, so hair is to fortuitous interpretation, we have said in selected/ nonsense. As dinette of miniature instinct/ is to `dinette' set."" (Welish is also a painter, and the poems' objects are often minimal but beautiful.) At times, the poems forget the human inflection and lose themselves in a stifled and grid-like scholasticism, as in a poem from the title sequence: ""Interior increasingly studious is twice/ seen, once in profile, once in profile re-routed/ to the interior, where is assumed/ red, a quantity of it."" But such moments of adamant geometry do not detract from Welish's overall achievement. Standouts among earlier books that have been culled for this collection are 1993's Casting Sequences, where Welish dramatizes her own poetic struggle of how to prioritize objects and people (""Alphabetizing the cards/ slavishly/ the person comes first,.."") and 1991's somewhat more conventionally lyrical The Windows Flew Open. The four subsections of new poems offer plenty of ""Arithmetic everywhere, with a little text""--the latter often involving Edward Gorey-like observations, as in ""H is for Hat"": ""Regrettably, you put it near me."" For Welish, as with the Alice Notley of Descent of Alette (or even the '70s Nathalie Sarraute), cordoned off words and phrases imply a poised and thoughtful consciousness, caught in the midst of intellective and amusing animations of things and thought. (Apr.)