Poetry | Page 79 | The Common

Review: Dragon Logic

March 3, 2014 Reviews

Book by STEPHANIE STRICKLAND
Reviewed by TERESE SVOBODA

Begin with the cover of Dragon Logic: double Garamond italic ampersands. Inverted they propose elegant dragons against a green hide background. “TWO dragons,” Stephanie Strickland writes in the eponymous poem, “keep a pearl/in the air untouched/if yes then no if no then yes.” Their “dragon logic” insists that the reader consider sets that consist of themselves, a common problem in questions of reflexivity where the self of the self-reference is a human self. This proposition enlarges the idea of the juggling proposed by John Keats’ concept of negative capability—“when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

February 2014 Poetry Feature

February 21, 2014 Poetry

This month The Common welcomes aboard four poets new to our pages: Maceo J. Whitaker, Claire Eder, Thomas March, and Jonathan Gerhardson. Two of these fine younger poets, Gerhardson and Whitaker, are being published for the first time. At The Common, we’re looking forward to more work by all four of them. Stay tuned.

MACEO J. WHITAKER

January 2014 Poetry Feature

January 23, 2014 Poetry, Translation

TADEUSZ DĄBROWSKI

Editor’s Note:

In October I had the pleasure of hearing the young Polish poet Tadeusz Dąbrowski read his poems in a bilingual performance at Atomic Books in Maryland, a stop on his recent tour of the United States. TC readers will no doubt join me in appreciation of his poems, which are simultaneously deeply moving and surprisingly comic. Hopefully you will also relish my aggressive effort to deliver his work to you. As soon as the reading was done I pursued him to the sidewalk, where I procured a promise that he would send us poems to publish. His word’s as good as his work: we’re offering four of his poems here, and three more will follow in the print issue.

Dabrowski is only thirty-four but has already published eight books of poetry; the list of his prizes is longer than the ingredients for plum pudding. His work has been translated around the world—into twenty languages—and his readership continues to grow. Another German collection is due out very soon, and Antonia Lloyd-Jones’ second volume of English translations is well underway—these poems come from that. He’s drawn high praise from Adam Zagajewski in his homeland, and in the US his Anglophone debut, Black Square, was hailed by Timothy Donnelly as a “brilliant, unforgettable book.” We welcome his work to our pages with sincere excitement.