Patricia Nelson is a semi-retired attorney and environmentalist. She has worked with the "Activist" group of poets in California for many years. The Activist credo is that every word in a poem should be poetically "active," employing some kind of focused poetic technique-a principle not as self-evident as it might sound. The group often works with metaphoric imagery.
In the beginning, they say, was the word. Patricia Nelson, mistress
of words that she is, is interested in what lies before that
beginning. Was the invention of language, she seems to ask in some
of her poems, entirely a gain? . . . . Again and again she zeroes
in on the ways language can reduce experience, not do justice to
it. Many of her poems feature those who abuse the language in some
form. Orators, politicians, preachers come in for some bad reviews.
They are shown using language to narrow things, limit things, draw
lines that should not be drawn. . . . Nelson has great sympathy for
the people--and creatures--that find themselves on the wrong side
of the borders that words and analogous human powers create.
--John Hart, author of The Climbers and Storm Camp, co-editor of
Blue Unicorn To read Patricia Nelson's poetry is to enter a vortex
of language pushing you to a world that is sideways and awry. These
hinted shapes breathe a tremendous vitality as each creature
strives to "untwist the sky," and tell "a truth of salt and star."
Patricia's touch can be deceptively light and gentle. But do not be
lulled by the lovely "song that widens the mouth like a vowel"--
read further and you may find "your red heart banging in its
bowl."
--Jean Wong, author of Sleeping with the Gods and Hurtling Jade and
Other Tales of Personal Folly Patricia Nelson's poetry startles
that mindspace where all known and well-worn thoughts live,
scattering linguistic lodgepoles. Her words break open the familiar
and pull us to the mumbling edge of unconscious recognition.
--Briahn Kelly-Brennan, poet In Spokes of Dream or Bird, Patricia
Nelson reminds us again how words and things relate, and how
sometimes they don't. For all that language is, for all it
describes, shapes, enhances, and liberates, it remains discrete
from its object, a pure label. In four parts, she explores "an old
thought - like a small-footed spider." Proposing that dreaming is
surfing waves to the shore, she challenges the very idea of the
mind and its workings, its connection to language, and language's
approximation of both subject and object. It's the best we can do,
with poetry an apt translator. These are poems of thought, of the
mysticism of the Druids, the symbolism of trees, the universality
of Odysseus Ulysses and his phantoms and phantasms, of dear ones
lost, of permanence and impermanence, taking the stage quietly, in
the shadows, "colors quiet in their jambs/edges understood."
--Jeff Santosuosso, poet, co-editor of Panoply, former co-editor of
Emerald Coast Review
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