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Picture courtesy of maggieball.
| Value for Money | 10/10 |
|---|---|
| Overall rating | 10/10 |
Full review by
maggieball
on 26th Sep 2006
User Rating : 10
Respect :
0
Good Points: Magdalena Ball, a New Yorker transplanted to Australia, is the founder and guiding light of the Compulsive Reader, the liveliest, most attractive, and most versatile site of its kind on the web. Her works of fiction, poetry, and articles have appeared in many anthologies and journals, and her poetry and fiction have won both local and national awards. She has studied at universities in the United States, Australia, and England. Her works include a valuable guide to reviewing, The Art of Assessment, and a soon to be published novel, Sleep before Evening. A chapbook like Quark Soup is a slender volume of poems. In this case the twenty-eight pages contain almost that many poems with each poem filling the page. The language of the poems depends heavily on the language of modern physics. At first blanch this may appear as the antithesis of poetry, but the ingenuities of the application disprove this. The birth of a child is seen in the same manner as the creation of the universe Photons, neutrinos, electrons and quarks brain, spinal cord, heart each living cell in a given moment of time and space forms part of a greater whole visible in the ice caves of your eyes. In the poems about children there is a simplicity and directness of utterance, however filtered through a poetic sensibility, that sets them apart. 'Moon Fountains' is obviously a meditation at one remove from an actual event involving an unusually gifted and precocious child. He knew when his mother kissed that peach-down cheek closing the most mundane bedtime story that his gentle aliens would be waiting his future clearer than the icy stars. Adults present other circumstances and the poems become more ambiguous and troubled. You pick up the paper rustling tragic headlines against the day sounds emerge like foghorns in your head cynicism and mistrust twin cyclones riding the low pressure cell of insecurity and fear twisting you further into the armchair of self-protection and greed until you are paralyzed prey for the ugly conviction of our enemy's worst weapons. The simplicity of the language and the directness of perception guarantee the effective-ness of these poems. They also have, as the last quotation attests, a captivating ability to pursue and nail down an essence by the tension of carefully chosen words and sounds. When Ball has had her say there is nothing more to be said. In her closing poem 'Planet X' she interrogates the frozen planet of the title. Would you wake from the stupor of your underworld prison if spring arrived breathing hot air against your immobile lips? At least one great part of what makes words into a poem is the craft of using words carefully. There is that craft in abundance in Quark Soup. Craft and strong perceptions and sensitivity
Bad Points: It is impossible that such a small sample as this chapbook provides can satisfy, and a sequel - a book, one hopes - is definitely required.
General comments: About the reviewer: Bob Williams is retired and lives in a small town with his wife, dogs and a cat. He has been collecting books all his life, and has done freelance writing, mostly on classical music. His principal interests are James Joyce, Jane Austen and Homer. His book Joyce Country, a guide to persons and places, can be accessed at: http://www.grand-teton.com/service/Persons_Places
maggieball's review and ratings | 560 words
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