Field Recordings

From oustide the lines: Cormorant Beyond the Compost By Elisavietta Ritchie   Cherry Grove Press, 2011 Elisavietta Ritchie's latest volume of poetry Cormorant Beyond the Compost burns with eroticism and life, and reading some of her poems is akin to watching a wick sizzle down on a firecracker, waiting for the pop, the smoke, and the final hiss. In the first section, Saint in a Box of Glass , Ritchie's world is polarized, the artistic voice versus the real world. There is a tension that builds in the opening poem “Tradecraft in Iambic Pentameter” where “true tales remain confined within the cage/of my long skull” and continues  through the first section where the speakers of these poems struggle with waking with reality, to creating one's own reality, best illustrated in “Ito Jakuchu artist b. 1716, Kyoto” where the young painter resists his father's ways, arranging vegetables in the market, soaking his senses in the fresh skin and smell of the produce for sale...