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Protocol for Touch

About Protocol for Touch

"Constance Merritt is a poet to defeat categories, to oppose 'the tyranny of names' with a poetry that sets its own terms of encounter, its 'protocols of touch'--tender and austere, formal and intimate at once. Hers is a voice with many musics, sufficiently rich, nuanced and various to express, maintain poise and wrest meaning from the powerful cross-currents in which the heart is torn. I have seldom seen intelligence equal to such a scorching degree of intensity, or mastery of form so equal to passion's contradictory occasions. Merritt's prosodic range is prodigious--she moves in poetic forms as naturally as a body moves in its skin, even as her lines ring with the cadenced authority of a gifted and schooled ear. Here, in her words, the iambic ground bass is in its vital questioning mode: "The heart's insistent undersong: how live?/how live? How live?" this poetry serves no lesser necesssity than to ask that."--Eleanor WilnerBetween us, how we wrestle over words Strain to wring some blessing from the silence, Deliverance from violence, its fear, its lure, The tyranny of names: night day, Sable and alabaster, flint shale, Steel and lace. Who among us can afford To speak the language--any language--rightly? As if it weren't enough to bear one heart Eternally divided in its chambers? We stand close enough to touch. We do Not touch. Between us burns a sword of fire, A rusted turnstile glinting in the sun.

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  • Language:
  • English
  • ISBN:
  • 9781574410839
  • Binding:
  • Paperback
  • Pages:
  • 96
  • Published:
  • August 29, 2000
  • Dimensions:
  • 230x153x10 mm.
Delivery: 1-2 weeks
Expected delivery: July 10, 2025

Description of Protocol for Touch

"Constance Merritt is a poet to defeat categories, to oppose 'the tyranny of names' with a poetry that sets its own terms of encounter, its 'protocols of touch'--tender and austere, formal and intimate at once. Hers is a voice with many musics, sufficiently rich, nuanced and various to express, maintain poise and wrest meaning from the powerful cross-currents in which the heart is torn. I have seldom seen intelligence equal to such a scorching degree of intensity, or mastery of form so equal to passion's contradictory occasions. Merritt's prosodic range is prodigious--she moves in poetic forms as naturally as a body moves in its skin, even as her lines ring with the cadenced authority of a gifted and schooled ear. Here, in her words, the iambic ground bass is in its vital questioning mode: "The heart's insistent undersong: how live?/how live? How live?" this poetry serves no lesser necesssity than to ask that."--Eleanor WilnerBetween us, how we wrestle over words Strain to wring some blessing from the silence, Deliverance from violence, its fear, its lure, The tyranny of names: night day, Sable and alabaster, flint shale, Steel and lace. Who among us can afford To speak the language--any language--rightly? As if it weren't enough to bear one heart Eternally divided in its chambers? We stand close enough to touch. We do Not touch. Between us burns a sword of fire, A rusted turnstile glinting in the sun.

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