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Vocabulary of Silence By Veronica Golos Red Hen Press ISBN: 9781597094986 86 pp. $16.83, paperback.
I could quote from every page of Vocabulary of Silence to show the compelling arrangements of words and spaces designed by Veronica Golos. In dealing with unspeakable human tragedy, her striking displays of lines and spaces express a wildness the words alone barely describe.
This innovative collection of poems displays heightened language, often by being in a reduced, concentrated pattern of phrases, and equally intense silences, represented by daring wide spaces between lines, phrases, single words. The subjects of the poems vary-from contemporary war and torture to biblical themes; from horror at Abu Ghraib to the image of a wild bird; but the motif of speech and no-speech, deprivation of speech, moves through all the poems, as does the poet's effort to articulate for all who suffer, and just as passionately for herself. The poems are "stunning"-as in shocking, as if the reader were struck physically; at the same time, the writing is beautiful. Images are sometimes metaphorical, but often simply real, direct. And the sound patterns, while giving the requirements of voices, support the meanings. The silence is equally vivid; it is as much an articulation in these pages as speechlessness is in suffering.
Even in simply describing an egret, Golos tells how "birth always clings, / refuses even as it pushes / so that to become what /you were made to be / the body must conjure out / of the kiln of air /... " Having gone deep in so few lines, as if in and out of the "kiln", her reader feels surprising passion. Then comes a sudden space-And the poem continues with "slateblue...