Farther by Susan Thackrey

Description

Farther, a book-length poem by Susan Thackrey
Poetry/Literature/Classic / isbn 978-1-946104-44-1
124 pages

There is a father in Farther, and in epigraphs from Homer and Robert Duncan, who imagined the blind Homer hanging out in the women’s house, and the rhythms of his poems coming from the sounds of their weaving. Ordo is the order of the threads. Thackrey here weaves a way through/under complex orders, calling us to order and disorder and finally to immanence. This is a lore poet in her prime.   — David Levi Strauss

Without reference of horizon farther makes navigation by usual instruments, and heroes, impossible.   We recognize the image on its cover as sea; we recognize its language as English.   Recognition ends there.  We are in a funnel descent — a downward circular motion that washes section titles from one another until only the letter O remains.   Words also turn into and fall from each other:  always compass /  encompassing passing / collapsing / as if beauty were complete / not.   We fall into the sea of Thackrey’s sleight of ear — a straight line of words becomes a spiral, a whole book a circling back.   We enter the letter O — lens opening, contraction — the slip space between letters, words, lines, the said, the implied echo.  This is how she turns us through the open portal of order’s disorder, a history that begins with sundering and ends with shattering — This is how she collapses the compass so that known coordinates disappear, making possible this paean to as if beauty that is infinitely farther.   —Susan Gevirtz

A sample of the poem:

derelict links
disintegrate
these
pieces
constant as
space-trash surrounds
our
O
discarded
knowledge time
beyond
form impossibly
broken