Rosmarie Waldrop’s titles include Another Language:
New & Selected Poems (Talisman House, 1997), a book
of collaborations with Keith Waldrop, Well Well Reality (The
Post-Apollo Press, 1998. Her memoir, Lavish Absence:
Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès, has been
published by Wesleyan Press (2002). She has received many
awards and fellowships,
including the NEA and the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest
Writers’ Award. Since 1968 she has been co-editor and
publisher of Burning Deck Press with her husband, translator
Keith Waldrop.
Praise for Rosmarie Waldrop from reviews of her previous
books
"
Waldrop fixes our attention on the literally figurative and
the figuratively literal.... This slippage, especially when
applied to the awkward reality of human sexuality, often
creates moments of true humor: Rosmarie Waldrop is at once
a philosopher of language and a master of the absurd that
arises as we try to say what we mean, or mean what we say,
or be what we may say."
--Eric Elshtain, Chicago Review
"Her jumpy, startling, abstract sentences seek to interrogate
ordinary notions of logic, reference, grammar and truth....
Waldrop's work plays intellect off against itself, appealing
to chaos theory, non-Euclidian geometry and contemporary
cosmology in order to undermine ordinary ideas...."
--Publishers Weekly
" Rosmarie Waldrop... mediates between
European and American experimental poetry.... The study of
the dialogic textuality
of language is also a study of ourselves and how we engage
the world. This is a powerful and not unfamiliar lesson;
but with a mixture of clarity and obliquity and much startling
imagery Waldrop give it a vitality no psycholinguistics textbook
offers."
--William Doreski, Harvard Review
From Love, Like Pronouns
(from the section “Impossible Object, for Jennifer
Moxley”, page 33)
Object Relations
How differently our words drift across danger or rush
toward a lover. Meaning married to always different coordinates.
I married a foreigner, in one sense. In another, no word
fits with another.
Your smile breaks from any point of your body. I need
a more complicated picture. This falls among crows-feet
and bears no fruit. What did it try? Replace your body?
My doubts stand in a circle around us. Like visitors
around the well under the house. They advise to board
it up. Dampness unhinges. And decay of fish.
It would mean all night. Hands scraped on rough surmise.
Remembering I too am a monster.
The objective character of statements has shifted to
relations. Boiling water and the length of a column
of mercury? Or that you mean me when you say “you”?
When I say “we were standing close” am I
saying: we were not touching? To replace a laugh. Which
could be described as: wish, yellowish, fish.
What if there is no well? What if language is not communication?
If facts refuse coordinates? Detachment vanishes, as
if thinned.
Meaning you consists in thinking of your body. There
are no fish in my mouth.
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