Idiolexicon

A Fiddle Pulled From The Throat Of A Sparrow -- Poems by Noah Eli Gordon

This collection, comprised of several of Gordon's older chapbooks and limited releases, spans the gambit of verse and becomes in a sense an autobiography of voice. The book begins as a subtle scale on a used bass, almost indistinguishable from modern silence, and quickly asserts its own mind.

Gordon's ability to tell an image as rhetoric and assemble narrative as metaphor are on display for all to see here as he moves from style to style. In one case he may interject a line and, in true improvisational jazz fashion, take it away. His unit of measure is not the syllable or the breath but the line itself as an interchangeable bar of language music.

I still believe, in seeing Gordon working his way through each poetic project, that he is a heavily tattooed heir to Berrigan, Moore, and Hejinian left alone at a piano with a hipster sensibility. Actual hipster, by the way, not, say, American Apparel/Urban Outfitters hipster. This collection is a great book of voice and language becoming self aware and stepping on to land and out of the din of poetic mud.

Labels: Recommended Reading