Description:
Poetry that serves as a broad collection of historical incidents and considers how we weigh and value events.
Named for a sura of the Quran, The Gathering is an epic in cantos that indiscriminately records deeds and events that have taken place on this earth. Its speaker--a nearly omniscient archivist--is propelled by a force more elemental than causation to visit moments and subjects, moving swiftly through thoughts, physiologies, and environments. Under an imperative to record everything encountered--however small, cruel, or sad--the archivist must grant radically equal weight to each thing. Yet as these entries accumulate, a strange significance accrues, and the negligible seems necessary. Each mundane fragment of life finds consolation. What was, was; what happened, got to happen.
Brief description:
Sherah Bloor is a South African poet and scholar and a doctoral candidate at Harvard University. She is coeditor and co-translator, with Tayseer Abu Odeh, of You Must Live: New Poems from Palestine. She is editor-in-chief of the literary and arts magazine, Peripheries: A Journal of Word, Image, and Sound, and her poems and translations have appeared in Chicago Review, Colorado Review, Conjunctions, Lana Turner, and the New York Review of Books, among others.
Review Quotes:
"I haven't seen any recent writing like Bloor's The Gathering. It's a collection of forty-one poems, each titled 'Canto'--and it stands up well under the weight that repeated title brings to bear. The poem enacts an expansive present moment in which everything (and anything) happens at once. With enormous patience and precision, Bloor tells us that 'The seed is milled, its oil added to Galaxie Eggless/Mayonnaise' and also that 'A neutron star rips open, emits gamma rays, ionizes earth's atmosphere.' That last sentence I quote is not a conclusion; it is surrounded by others detailing daily life, life in the distant past, and life in a high-tech virtual future. Each is rendered in detail and given equal weight. This book is an ambitious tour-de-force bringing to mind (my mind at least) the work of Ezra Pound, Ron Silliman, and Lyn Hejinian. I admire it greatly."
--Rae Armantrout, author of "Go Figure"