Helen Vendler (Photo by Janet Reider) |
The poet’s Gothic, so indispensable to her early work, has become “plain” in her flattened menagerie, in her taciturn journeys (“The train passed slowly through every belt we know: Prayer, Tornado, Bible, Grain”), in her description of a mummified bird placed in its owner’s purse “circa 1892” and hidden behind the chimney bricks in the Dumas Brothel Museum: “In your glass case now, canary.... // You are beautiful, grotesque.”
There are three types of quotation involved here. First, there’s the parenthetical “The train passed slowly through every belt we know: Prayer, Tornado, Bible, Grain.” Second, there’s the use of the tiny detail “circa 1892” to describe the mummified bird in the purse. And, third, following the colon, there’s the “In your glass case now, canary.... // You are beautiful, grotesque.” The combination makes for a delightfully strange sentence that went straight into my personal anthology of great quotation.
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