Archive - February 12, 2013

Road Scatter: Poems by Sandra Meek (Botswana 1989–91) Persea Books,$15.95 86 pages 2012 Reviewed by Ann Neelon (Senegal 1978-79) The revolutionary aspect of Sandra Meek’s new collection Road Scatter-in which the poems are focused, although not exclusively, on a daughter’s vigil at her dying mother’s beside-is that it gives us elegy as kinetic sculpture.  Instead of traditional lament, we get clatter, crash and shimmer. It is as if, in each poem, grief plummets like a ball down a shoot, hits a force field of running water and is then channeled to a lever, which flings it onto a piano key, forcing it to set off not just an echoing note but also a flashing light. We get a sense of how living through a death-in the dullness of its seemingly endless repetitions, but also in its unexpected scintillations-is like turning on a grief machine. Grief is not static, but rather . . .