(This review first appeared in Under the Radar 11.)
Two collections and more than two voices: Morgan Harlow’s Midwest Ritual Burning; Anne Stevenson’s Astonishment.
I am in Reading Central Library and I am thinking about voice in poems. (This is an example of my voice.) I often suspect voice of being a writing circle cliché, of being too often prefixed by ‘your’, as a vague quality which writers, we’re told, must try to develop. Voice is certainly troublesome as it means somehow to ground language in a source, which is something language, by its nature, is continually trying to resist. In thinking about poems we need, rather, to think about voice from the point-of-view of the reader, and how the reader identifies a voice. For this end, I have two quite different collections from two American poets: Morgan Harlow’s Midwest Ritual Burning and Anne Stevenson’s Astonishment. Midwest Ritual Burning is Harlow’s debut collection; Astonishment is Stevenson’s sixteenth, following (amongst other publications) a Selected Poems edited by Andrew Motion. Midwest Ritual Burning is published by Eyewear Publishing, poet Todd Swift’s new venture; Astonishment is published by Bloodaxe. Even so, in both there is much to consider about what we mean by voice. I’ll start with the younger poet.