The Soft Signature

Kim Fahner is the author of You Must Imagine the Cold Here.

To say that this book of poems is a challenge is an understatement.
Extracting meaning from Downe’s poetic fragments and sequences demands
one’s full attention. Downe is a poet who enjoys playing with language
and turning syntactic structure upside down. As she writes in her
prelude: “All of these words have appeared elsewhere./Only their order
has been changed/to maintain their innocence.”

In “entry,” a poem that serves as a door into the collection, Downe
writes of meaning: “In numbers like the sand / whose twofold
conception / might argue with one and the same / there generates more
than had been predicted / a learning to fluster the game.” Later in
the collection, the poet reiterates this idea of linguistic revelation:
“this is the sort of place where a little bit suggests a lot.” In
“arranged tributaries,” she continues: “where long ago something
unexpected grew quietly / hinting the vocabulary we have inherited /
percolates / follows a discretionary curve of space / from one end of
the field to the other.”

Lise Downe is a poetic shape-shifter, in that the poems she fashions
are “lines that form outlines / of the things they portray / evocative
/ though no longer recognizable.”