ISBN: 0-88739-343-8
80 pp.
Size: 6 x 9
Pub Date: 4/2001
Paperback Original
Price: $15.00
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Origin of the World, The
A Donald S. Ellis Book
Lewis Warsh
Seventeen poems written from 1990 to 1999, and though each one stands on its own, they can also be read as one long poem, line after line stitched together and edited like an epic movie. Each of the lines is both a whole world and a fragment of existence, and their accumulation creates a disembodied narrative that encompasses autobiography, love, politics, violence, and history.
INVASION OF PRIVACY
I look for her under every awning
By accident, I spill wine in her lap or bite her neck when she offers her cheek
I watch her cross the street, against the light, with her head inclined
I see her in the shadows of the branches at the close of day
We invent a new language just to say the simplest things
It's a kind of dream just to watch her walk away.
Review: "Lewis Warsh's thought is not circular, but spiral, in fact-and is, this way, totally appropriate for the times. All propositions turn back on themselves; the image of truth is uncertainty; and all that we know about a thing is limited to our knowledge of its limits."
-Fanny Howe
"Given the complexity of this world and all the myriad people who are in it, these poems are poignantly articulate experiments, which reach out endlessly, day or night, so as to feel another is still there too. If one could ever doubt, Lewis Warsh proves again that the world exists even after all is said and done."
-Robert Creeley
"The discrete (though hardly discreet) sentences in Lewis Warsh's new book actually merge to describe something like the origin of the world. As he says, 'Connect the dots to create a picture of something unimaginable.'"
-John Ashbery
"It's incumbent on us to watch closely and observe will-to do otherwise is to miss what's happening. In this wonderful new book, Lewis Warsh sets out through a landscape swept with occurrence. As he looks about, somber image and glimpsed exegesis play off each other and the works unfold. Their lines flicker and figure; they resemble the light images of which movies are made. They leap, fade, reappear-figuring out the world. As Lewis Warsh brilliantly reveals, this is the origin, always ongoing, of the world."
-Lyn Hejinian
Bio: LEWIS WARSH is the author of two novels, a volume of stories, and numerous books of poems. He is on the faculty of Long Island University in Brooklyn.
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