REVIEW

Simone Muench, Lampblack & Ash, Sarabande Books, 2005

[Review Guidelines]

It's No Secret We Love That Conductor Of Language, Simone Muench, Her Poems, Her Intellect, Her New Book Lampblack & Ash, (We Love, Yes) And Since The Book Itself Can Be Read, In Part, As A Tribute To The Poet Robert Desnos, What Follows Can Be Read As A Tribute To Lampblack & Ash, In The Tradition Of The Great Tribute Bands, A Little Theft (The Italicized Words/Lines Come From The Book), A Little Obsession, A Little Inspiration, A Little Never As Good As The Real Thing:


A poem about you would begin with a hummingbird,
a French Surrealist, a word we've forgotten
or rarely use or never used that sings

that says this is the joy of poetry:
cumulonimbus, cuttlebone, augury, filigree.

It would speak of the skin of villains
of blood on a light bulb of a proposal
to a poem, a marriage proposal.

It would look to the past and find a comparison,
an inspiration, drag him from the ash.

It would be a love poem, a heart
full of seaplants smelling like lead and laundry,
The other side of the romantic.

It would have to be inventive, an asterisk of snow,
a poem littered with trout silk and it would take

the gray underside of this life and fill it with color:
a mandarin flame, a man who lives two blocks down who barks at his car,
a conversation in the dark ardor of a parked car.

It would be in couplets, in tercets, of men
and women, the language between them, the hidden.

It would turn Medusa's serpents to fiery curls,
be full of ghost deer, victims that linger,
haunt, illuminate the page.

A resurrection of the silenced, the unheard.