| REVENANTS
Poems
by Mark Nowak "Mark
Nowak encounters the whispers of creation and cultural remembrance in his eminent,
visionary poetry. Revenants is an original return to a splendid ethos of ancestral
word patterns, and the images bear the solemn pleasures of time, place, and singular
landscapes." -Gerald Vizenor "One
of the most original collections of poetry I’ve re\ad in years. In it, the curling
smoke of myth mixes with the smoke from cooking sausages, and heavy steps of history
are crisscrossed by the indelible birdtracks of particular places, recorded by
the poet in his fieldnotes. Polish words, photographs, documentary quotations,
and a deeply intelligent attention to "the multiple truths//apparent in others’
lives" set this book apart from any other. Nowak’s canny, peripatetic sentences
break off in medias res, repeat and extend themselves, or gather into anaphoric
chant rhythms His poems are a new way of reading the world." -Forrest
Gander This first
book-length collection of poetry by the editor of the journal XCP: Cross-Cultural
Poetics explores the Polish American neighborhoods in and around Buffalo, New
York, finding collective truths in the particularity of a unique culture.. In
the opening poem sequence, Nowak tracks cultural, historic, and aesthetic connections
between his hometown in New York and areas he has traveled in rural and urban
Poland, all the while critiquing the misrepresentation and appropriation of Slavic
folk practices in armchair-anthropologist Sir James George Frazers’ The Golden
Bough. Nowak posits means of "being"-in North America and abroad-in
cities at various stages of abandonment and reconstruction. The poems in this
section are driven by Polish folklore, and exude an authoritative, pastoral tone,
with many references to agriculture. The later sections, montage poems employing
a style similar to Paul Metcalf and Walter Benjamin, seek ways to comprehend historical
memory and cultural traditions as practices continually re-invented in the present.
Nowak’s
expansive first book offers imaginative new options
for the integration of cultural production and cultural
critique in the contemporary poem.
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