Reviews for From shore to shore

The average rating for From shore to shore based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-05-14 00:00:00 Skyler Egert The Dutch Fiftiers' movement had its beginnings in the art world of postwar Amsterdam, among the painters who joined together in 1948 to form the Experimental Group Holland (De Experimentele Groep Holland), known internationally as Cobra (COpenhagen-BRussels-Amsterdam). Its birth manifesto proclaimed in part: "A living art recognizes no distinction between the beautiful and the ugly because it doesn't draw up any aesthetic norms. The ugly which functioned as a supplement to the beautiful in the artistic production of the culture of the last centuries was a permanent indictment of the unnaturalness of this class community and its aesthetics based on virtuosity, a demonstration of the curbing, restrictive influence which these aesthetics exerted on the natural creative urge." - Introduction, pg. ix * * * From Bert Schierbeek... look as humans we are so ancient that we almost cannot contain (due to the Great Forgetting) the experience of ages (our buildings up) and often don't want to meanwhile we do (and thereby) live that way and therefore the dream is often greater than our waking life so that the lifeless words and the deeds never realize themselves . . . . . . . . . . grief is the metabolizing of a wound the acknowledgement of a healing . . . . . . . . . . bird sings branch breaks bird falls bird flies bird sings . . . . . . . . . . the door a door is open or closed a door that's open is a hole toward space a door that's closed part of the wall marks off space if it moves it is a door so I am a door - from The Door, pg. 11-12 From Jan G. Elburg... This sadness is real just as a fake diamond can be real glass: I understand, I eat and I'm alive and there's a lot worse, for me too, but anyway . . . I see the birds, and I do not hear them. I hear the birds, and they are hidden. I am not whole. I am half a kiss, half a caress, I am not whole. - this sadness, pg. 17-18 From Gerrit Kouwenaar... "Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent" so in fact only feasible in fact, so unfeasible in language without at least that indefinite article: a love that without much talking flattens the world like grass in the lukewarm milk of the evening the world was a park with gratis roses you and I when the volcano erupted when the city council gave in when the coffee break broke you let your tongue run away with you blabbing about ariadne's thread, and I releasing myself though I'd choke - - whereof one cannot speak, pg. 33-34 From Lucebert... I try in poetic fashion that is to say simplicities luminous waters to give expression to the expanse of life at its fullest if I had not been a man like masses of men but if I had been who I was the stone or fluid angel birth and decay would not have touched me the road from forlorness to communion the stones beasts beasts bids bids road would not be so befouled as it can be seen to be in my poems that are snapshots of that road in this age what was always called beauty beauty has burned her face she no longer comforts mean she comforts the larvae the reptiles the rats but she startles man and strikes him with the awareness of being a breadcrumb on the universe's skirt no longer evil alone the deathblow alone makes us rebellious or meek but also good the embrace that leaves us fumbling in despair at space and so I sought out language in her beauty heard there she had nothing human left but the speech defects of the shadow but those of the earsplitting sunlight - I try in poetic fashion, pg. 39-40 From Sybren Polet... I say. Say nothing, I say nothing but: We. It often fissions but is, for it has a sp. gravity of 34.3, atomic number 2: 2 protons (you and I), 2 neutrons (?), and a very small neutrino. While emitting a ʌ particle we develop so much erotic heat - the equal of six complete married couples in their first degree of acquaintanceship - that we matter-mystics dissolve in light. Neutral is the whiteness that surrounds nothing, is nothing, wills nothing. No astrophysicist drifts past. No supersonic angel rustles. - No atom, no adept, no Adam. - We Matter, pg. 53 From Remco Campert... Unbelievable that when I was a boy I wrote a poem about the silver whiteness of a birch tree and all about me the grand spree of Liberation: water turned into whisky. Everybody boozed and fucked, all Europe was one big mattress and the sky the ceiling of a third rate hotel. And I timid youth simply had to sing the pure birch and the modest beauty of its leafage. - Unbelievable, pg. 68 From Hugo Claus... No house is so black That I cannot live in it Cannot span my hands across its walls No morning is so white That I cannot wake in it Like a bed Thus I live and wake in this house On the crossroads of night and morning And wander over fields of nerve filament And touch with my fingernails 10 At each resigned abandoned body's approach Incantating chaste words Like: rain and wind apple bread Clotted and dark blood of women - An Angry Man, pg.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-06-26 00:00:00 Michael Gaeta I liked this, and was especially comforted by the paintings at the end of the volume given the current climate. But I was irritated that there wasn't a single female poet in the anthology. Boo. Do better.