Precepts - Clark Allison

                  take care
with the summary
nothing to put her off
glaring
well, on the contrary

A relatively brisk and somewhat unconventional or innovative collection of thirty untitled poems presented as a series, upon inspirations as varied as Robert Creeley, Rae Armantrout and Jack Kerouac’s haikus. Questions of poetic affect and critical intervention might include the place of formalism, which is implicit here rather than stressed, of inspiration in the pertinence of phenomenological awareness and attention to narrative progression. There is also a very conscious attention to the mediations of language, in the sense that this is how we channel experience and interaction, being in society, in various relations among people and our situatedness in terms of physical place. As for themes there are such issues as how we relate, and, again, how that affects the mode of speech, of satisfaction or frustration with how things are; how dialogue must coexist with introspection.