The Daily Glance--bruno neiva
Bruno neiva's dough is a short chapbook with eighteen brief poems. They work well together, for they seem to be circling around the same themes: getting past small talk, politics, hermeneutics. In fact, their short quality makes them feel like single sentence insights cast out for a reader.
nine
various objects
on the writing-table
shadow the wording,
rendering it bookish
The insight here seems common for writers at first, but, of course, once you inspect the word use, that insight gets complicated. What, for example, does shadow mean here? Do we have a light coming past an object onto a page thus making a shadow over the words? Are the objects getting the shadow from the wording? However this word is interpreted, what is the "it"? The wording? We have four brief lines but a myriad of possibilities for interpretation.
Other poems in this collection work in much the same way. Neiva does not go out of his way to explain anything to us; rather, he gives us brief bits of language that seem to border a conversation, and we must figure out how to read them, as personal, as political, as social. Whatever a reader decides, the poems themselves are worth the exploration.
nine
various objects
on the writing-table
shadow the wording,
rendering it bookish
The insight here seems common for writers at first, but, of course, once you inspect the word use, that insight gets complicated. What, for example, does shadow mean here? Do we have a light coming past an object onto a page thus making a shadow over the words? Are the objects getting the shadow from the wording? However this word is interpreted, what is the "it"? The wording? We have four brief lines but a myriad of possibilities for interpretation.
Other poems in this collection work in much the same way. Neiva does not go out of his way to explain anything to us; rather, he gives us brief bits of language that seem to border a conversation, and we must figure out how to read them, as personal, as political, as social. Whatever a reader decides, the poems themselves are worth the exploration.
Comments