Rosmarie Waldrop

“If memory serves, it was five years ago that yours began to refuse,” Rosmarie Waldrop writes to her husband in The Nick of Time. “Does it feel like crossing from an open field into the woods, the sunlight suddenly switched off? Or like a roof without edge or frame, pushed sideways in time?” Ten years in the making, Waldrop’s phenomenally beautiful new collection explores the felt nature of existence as well as gravity and velocity, the second hemisphere of time, mortality and aging, language and immigration, a Chinese primer, the artist Hannah Höch, and dwarf stars. Of one sequence, “White Is a Color,” first published as a chapbook, the Irish poet Billy Mills wrote, “In what must be less than 1000 words, Waldrop says more about the human condition and how we explore it through words than most of us would manage in a thousand pages.” Love blooms in the cut, in the gap, in the nick between memory and thought, sentence and experience. Like the late work of Cézanne, Waldrop’s art has found a new way of seeing and thinking that “vibrates on multiple registers through endless, restless exploration” (citation for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize).

Rosmarie Waldrop says Gap Gardening “spans forty years of exploring the language I breathe and move in and that continues to condition me even while I try to contribute to it. It tracks my turn from verse to prose poems, to focusing on the sentence and its boundaries, my increasing reliance on collage and source texts as a way of engaging with other voices, of being in dialogue.”

Gap Gardening also traces Waldrop’s growing sense of writing as an exploration of what happens in between. Between words, sentences, people, cultures. Between fragment and flow, thinking and feeling, mind and body. For the first time, we have a complete and clear view of the work of a great and inquiring, brave and indispensable poet.

Driven to Abstraction is Rosmarie Waldrop’s sixth collection of poetry with New Directions. The first of its two sections, “Sway-Backed Powerlines,” consists of five sequences of prose poems whose subject matter ranges from voyages of discovery and the second Iraq war to geometry, memory, and the music of John Cage. Part two, the title sequence, investigates the tendency to abstraction in our lives which, in the West, began with the Renaissance introduction of zero into arithmetic, the vanishing point into perspective, and imaginary money in economics. Driven by the tension between abstraction and the concrete, and written in the shadow of ongoing wars, these poems are among Waldrop’s most engaging and thrilling works to date, the writing of a master poet at the height of her creative powers.

Rosmarie Waldrop’s Curves to the Apple brings together three highly praised and influential titles: The Reproduction of Profiles, Lawn of Excluded Middle, and Reluctant Gravities. Though originally published separately, these prose poems have always been intended as a loose trilogy of thought and feeling—or of thought manifested as feeling. The author comments: “Just as the title, Curves to the Apple, combines the organic and geometry (not to mention myth and history of science) the poems navigate the conflicting, but inextricable claims of body and mind, especially the female body and feelings in a space of logic and physics. The poems could all be called dialogic, reaching out across a synaptic (sometimes humorous) gap to a possible ’you’ (though it may be rhetorical, another point of view in the same mind). But while the ’I’ dominates the first two volumes, the third gives both voices equal space and chance.”

For the title of her newest collection of prose poems, Rosmarie Waldrop adopts a term––“blindsight”––used by the neuroscientist Antonio R. Damasio to describe a condition in which a person actually sees more than he or she is consciously aware. Like the dwellers in Plato’s cave, what each of us apprehends is never more than tiny fragments of the whole, and it is only with our blindsight that we can stretch our perceptions and understanding beyond our physical limitations. “This is one reason,” explains Waldrop, “for using collage: joining my fragments to other people’s fragments in a dialogue, a net that might catch a bit more of the ’world.’” The collection––the author’s fourth with New Directions––is divided into four thematic sections. The first, “Hölderlin Hybrids,” resonates against the German poet’s twisted syntax, while using rhythmic punctuation in counterpoint to sense. “As Were,” says Waldrop, “began with looking at the secondary occupations of artists––for example, Mallarmé teaching English, Montaigne serving as mayor of Bordeaux––but this soon gave way to playing more generally with particular aspects of historical figures.” The title section, “Blindsight,” is most consistent in its use of collage, juxtaposing words and images to jolting, epiphanic effect. “Cornell Boxes,” in contrast, has a formal unity, inspired by the constructions of Joseph Cornell, each prose poem “box” composed in a structure of fours: four paragraphs of four sentences each, with four footnotes.

In her new volume of prose poem “dialogues,” Reluctant Gravities, Rosmarie Waldrop once again pushes the boundaries and definitions of poetry, prose, gender, relationship, even language itself. Intended as a sequel to The Reproduction of Profiles and Lawn of Excluded Middle, Reluctant Gravities gives the rhetorical “you” addressed in those earlier volumes a voice and response. Some of Waldrop’s concerns are formal. As the author herself says, she “cultivates cuts, discontinuity, leaps, shifts of reference” in an attempt to compensate for the lack of margin, where verse would turn toward the white of the page, toward what is not. Instead, her “gap gardening” tries to place the margin, the emptiness inside the text. Yet the overriding point of the dialogues is determinedly human as the two voices with wit and philosophical playfulness debate aspects of “Aging,” “Depression,” “Desire,” and even ’’The Millennium."

The legacy of cultural imperialism, the consequences of gender, and the marginalization of the conquered are themes that combine and comment, one on the other, in Rosmarie Waldrop’s remarkable new work, A Key into the Language of America. As “formally adventurous” (A.L. Nielson, Washington Review) as ever, German-born Waldrop has based her new collection on Rhode Island founder Roger Williams’s 1643 guide (of the same name) to Narragansett Indian language and lore.

Do Wittgenstein and water mix? Philosophy and the facts of everyday life? The remarkable prose poems in Rosmarie Waldrop’s The Reproduction of Profiles prove that startling new insights are possible when philosophical formulations are turned on their heads. The poet comments “I used Wittgenstein’s phrases in a free, unsystematic way, sometimes quoting, sometimes letting them spark what they would, sometimes substituting different nouns within a phrase (e g., his famous anti-metaphysical statement that ’the deepest questions are no questions at all’ becomes ’You could prove to me that the deepest rivers are, in fact, no rivers at all’).”

From the revolutionary author of Marat/Sade, a meticulously observed and macabre novel of hell on earth. The Shadow of the Coachman’s Body was unanimously praised as an original work of art by critics when it first appeared in 1960. Here, in poet Rosmarie Waldrop’s pitch-perfect translation, Weiss presents a vividly alive black comedy of inert objects—stones, buttons, needles, tin cups, celestial orbs, an overwound music box—with a supporting cast of the oblique residents of a dismal boarding house.

Described by Weiss as a “micro-novel,” his first prose work can be obscene, trivial and brutal, and yet it is also peculiarly intimate with endless possibilities—a telescope and kaleidoscope rolled into one.