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Reading Novalis in Montana

Drawing inspiration from Novalis (1772-1801) a poet who, like the other adherents of early German Romanticism, believed in the correspondence between inner and outer worlds, Kwasny divines the palpable and ineffable ways in which inherited traditions — indigenous culture, mythology, romanticism, modernism, surrealism, postmodernism, and more — inform daily life.

Finding inspiration in the mountain West, Kwasny weaves a shimmering web of connections. Reading Novalis in Montana stretches boundaries with a section of “reading poems” — poems in dialogue with romantic and modernist poets, including Ezra Pound, H.D., Novalis, Dickinson, as well as a sequence that is a twenty-first century take on “The Wasteland,” included with stunning lyric poems.

Using luxuriant syntax to string together conditional clauses, these poems throw the reader backward and forward within a line and a poem. Alternatively, repetition offers a commentary on meaning, chopping perception into fragments. Combined with a charming self-qualification that deliberately interrupts momentum, this work smartly ties the reader back down to earth.

Throughout details of lived experience emerge — hiking through the Pacific Northwest, helping a friend deal with cancer, sorting through the ruins of a relationship —and yet the interior voice is always tuned to the physical world, envisioning the shared understanding that connects all life.

  • Format
  • paperback
  • Pages
  • 96
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 9781571314291
  • Genres
  • poetry
  • Release date
  • 2009