Art Poetic'

Nimble invention and linguistic play flourish in Parisian writer Cadiot's collection of 14 long poems, first published in French in 1988. The poems embark on extemporaneous, often puckish, inquiries about the world using a language that continually rediscovers the pleasure of its own game, while finding adventure in the most unassuming of phrases and experiences. Cadiot's desire for knowledge in the face of his understanding that ""one can't know all that goes on/ there"" leads him to revisit, diagram and permute ordinary phenomena and motifs--blue skies, storms, dresses, letter writing, waiting, the historical Peter and Paul--in an effort to sort through the simultaneous perspectives and alternatives of everyday events. The result is a fugue of musical and visually innovative lines that call to mind both the descriptive observational writings of Francis Ponge and the temporal obsession of Marcel Proust. In ""(n-I),"" the accessible directness of propositions such as ""There are more books in a bookstore than in a library/ There are fewer trees in the garden than in the orchard/ There's a huge crowd. There was a huge crowd"" unfolds artlessly into understatements of speculative, metaphysical wonder: ""There's someone in the garden. Is there someone in the garden?"" Other poems like ""bla-bla-bla"" and ""The Tempest"" apply rules of mathematical induction and propositional logic to an endlessly generative flux of grammatical transpositions, inversions, conjugations and restatements, suggesting that the passage from one known reality to the next might be accomplished through a mere difference in words: ""I am building a house by the sea/ could mean:/ (1) I am building the house myself/ or/ (2) I am having the house built/ To know the world is an enriching thing."" With humor and persistence, Cadiot's collection teases and challenges the world it creates, inviting the reader to practice its strange, familiar language. (Sept.)