Loop
From AwardAnnals
| This creative work has a long or truncated description. Please review the creative work guidelines concerning descriptions and edit down or replace the description. |
 | |
| Author(s) | Anne Simpson |
|---|---|
| Subtitle | Poems |
| Publisher | McClelland & Stewart |
| Honors | |
| In Loop, Anne Simpson explores the power, and the anguish, of many different modes of return—retrieval, revision, the covering of old ground with eyes wider and thoughts reconditioned by difficult wisdom. These poems occur at that place where a focused, compassionate vision comes to inhabit language and to find the forms that will suffice: a Möbius strip poem that loops back on itself; a crown of sonnets that take us back to the shock and grief of the twin towers and find deep resonance with paintings by Brueghel; a set of quick improvisations like the… | |
In Loop, Anne Simpson explores the power, and the anguish, of many different modes of return—retrieval, revision, the covering of old ground with eyes wider and thoughts reconditioned by difficult wisdom. These poems occur at that place where a focused, compassionate vision comes to inhabit language and to find the forms that will suffice: a Möbius strip poem that loops back on itself; a crown of sonnets that take us back to the shock and grief of the twin towers and find deep resonance with paintings by Brueghel; a set of quick improvisations like the motion studies done for a drawing class. Simpson’s work shows us, again and again, the insight and excitement that come from the practice of a necessary craft in the service of a committed vision.
A Word from the Poet
Loop has much to do with the play of poetic forms, some of which are re-worked traditional forms, such as the corona (crown) of sonnets, or the villanelle, and some of which are invented forms: for instance, “Möbius Strip.” I find that playing with form allows me to play with ideas; it is because I can look at the world aslant by using an unusual form that I can often take hold of an idea in a unique way. These forms invariably loop back on themselves, as is the case with the corona of sonnets, in which the first line of the first sonnet becomes the last line of the last sonnet. In “Möbius Strip,” as well, there is a clear looping around to the beginning in terms of form. But it is more than that for me: it’s also a case of looping around, orcircling around, an idea in order to examine it more fully, so it’s a bit like turning a stone around in the hand.
There are a number of poems in Loop that are deeply attentive to the natural world, and others that take a more political stance, but my concerns come together in that it seems necessary—indeed, more necessary of late—to witness the world in all its myriad possibilities. I suppose this opens out to include the possibility of the infinite in a long poem like “The Trailer Park,” which is, perhaps, a way of seeing a cosmos in a trailer park.
