Modern Age - Winter 2016 - 149

REVIEWS

May invoke a muse.
Or obfuscate.
You choose:
Purple prose?
Boiler plate?
Language is a sorcerer
and may so entrance
the dedicated listener
she cannot tell the dancer from the dance
or syntax from the sense.
And it may ennoble
the soul, electrify the mind,
beautify the Chernobyls
of our devastated hearts, and enable
us to know our human kind.

Such discoveries are not information privy to poets only, and
"Learning the Language" makes that clear; even animals such as
an African grey parrot in the section's title poem has an epistemological epiphany, and a "blue jay in the snow / is a text / that cannot be read / out of the context / of the snow falling / around us."
"Frontward" deals with the educational experiences in language
of the speaker's brother and sister, one who learns the alphabet
backward, the other who began speaking backward. The speaker,
however, prefers a more orthodox employment: "I say the alphabet frontward / and I speak frontward. / I love the way a frontward
language / spills into the future, the river into its mouth."
Cherry invites, perhaps inevitably, Wordsworthian comparisons
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Modern Age - Winter 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Modern Age - Winter 2016

Contents
Modern Age - Winter 2016 - Cover1
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Modern Age - Winter 2016 - Contents
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