A Poem Book a Week #2 AREA--marcella durand

Something special about a book when it is given as a gift from a publisher--here this one is a favorite.

What I have in response are the marks of active reading:

The same story cut up and arranged into a different pattern of shards.
It torches like an idea or a dream.
We may contain plastic, but we are not of it.
Acrylic doesn't breath and can be
transported into space. It holds color
and doesn't let anyone in. 
Invisibility forms buoyancy.
While in the rippling seven bands luminous and ephemeral, the landscape features may fracture or appear to fracture in the viewpoint of computer-generated hue.
And you rub your eyes thinking such shades could never be. They could never appear except transfused through wire and socket, cord, outlet, oil, coal, and a little water and wind.
One is overlaid over the other, or one came first, but which is linear and what expands in crumbling starfish shape? Tonight, the light over the chemical plants is exquisite. Long factory shadows spread over the invasive fountain grasses, pale beige heads nodding over the shallow waters.

We are going to stop here on page twenty-seven as memory of an idea hits. What I value most from AREA as an entry point is the poem "Scale Shift" which is about the relationship between time, place, and color. For instance, if you live in the northeast in the first decades of the third millennium, then each season (winter, spring, summer, fall) has its own set of colors. But then there is an argument that the human relationship to earth does damage to the processes of the earth and desire: were humans not industrializing and digitizing. And, so what durand helps us to see (if you can forgive the pun) is that the visual representation of that damage is in the loss of color in our geographies--urban landscapes, but also dystopic desserts. She doesn't leave us with color as only earth, but also color as skin. So my take-away in the middle of reading a challenging text is an argument for the importance of diversity of colors... so it's a useful book if you want to think along lines of racial and ecological justice... circles... areas...

The poem that then opens up some of durand's brilliance as wordsmith for then going back to access perspectives throughout the book (as Donna Masini says, a poet teaches you how to read them) is the first prose poem in "The Verneuil Process." It starts off with sky and clouds, then moves to bay, and then ocean. There is a description of the process of seeing ("It takes opacity to capture light") and then an eye. As a reader the first time, I think it is a human eye. But then we get noise of a "passing giant crushing turbine" and a "flapping" turns to "thrashing" and "light fracturing along tissue," and the eye that seemed disembodied as only eye, becomes eye that is part of a fish suddenly being caught by a giant commercial fishing boat. Because the plot of the poem occurs through descriptions of kinetic and sonic imagery, the reader is absorbed into the story to empathize with fish and what durand imagines it feels like to be the horror for a fish being caught by commercial boat.

So my take-away here is to as I read be more thoughtful about point-of-view and how imagery might be creating narrative.