Distant mandate

Mlinko (Marvelous Things Overheard) repurposes the archaic and deposits the mythic into a contemporary space, crafting glimmering poems of scrupulous linguistic intricacy that transcend time. In one she travels away from "the land/ of Dollar This, Save That, Thrift Buys" and ends in a new place, which she describes through a series of musical negations that include likening a shell to an ancient Greek skin scraper: "Seems like nothing's gentle here but mist:/ not spiky palms, sand spurs, the strigil/ of a shell that scrapes the rock to grist;/ not the lighthouse's gimlet vigil." Propelled by sound, Mlinko's end-rhyme patterns amplify her deft wordplay. These song-like structures are, for her, a small source of stability in an ever-changing world. She admits, "I guess we like our stanzas/ like barrier islands taking the hit/ when the Atlantic's/ all worked up in one of its blustery/ dances." Mlinko's "Repeated patterns tease" and further mark her preoccupation with stable geometries: "Ocean beyond the ramparts/ suggests that stem-celled seconds fiend-/ ishly agglomerate with fits and starts// into unprecedented forms." References to forts and fortresses ("the feminine form!") also dot the collection, whose title is derived from a László Krasznahorkai comment on the Alhambra in Spain. Seeking order within chaos, Mlinko layers delicately wrought lines into crystalline solids. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Mlinko's readers have come to expect language teased to high ebullience yet constrained by strictly applied traditional poetics. Her fifth collection (after Marvelous Things Overheard) will not disappoint. The poet offers an impressionistic travelog that translates the physical and mythic dimensions of her destinations (Cypress, Texas, Marrakech, the route of the monarch butterfly) into rococo tongue twisters ("children chisel fridge magnets/ of fish fossils off grottoes/ for tourists of writing") and comically apt imagery ("From the weathered boards knots pop/ like the eyes of potatoes"). Rife with herbs, wildflowers, and weeds, these poems present nature as an active agent, not as a diorama to be admired: "A rough, hairy pod-surprise!/ -jumps at my touch/ and squirts seed at my eyes." Mlinko's rhymes are risky and clever (airstrips-eclipse, palmettos-stilettos), and though not all succeed (Jesus's-breeze's), it's clear that her poems are undertaken as formal challenges as much as avenues for self-expression. VERDICT Admirers of James Merrill and A.E. Stallings will feel most at home here, but one need not be a globetrotting philologist to sense the flashes of loss, regret, and belatedly gained wisdom just below the poet's elaborately allusive style and arcane diction.-Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.