A Protocol for Touch

Constance Merritt is a poet to defeat categories to oppose the tyranny of names with a poetry that sets its own terms of encounter its protocols of touchtender and austere formal and intimate at once. Hers is a voice with many musics sufficiently rich nuanced and various to express maintain poise and wrest meaning from the powerful cross-currents in which the heart is torn. I have seldom seen intelligence equal to such a scorching degree of intensity or mastery of form so equal to passions contradictory occasions. Merritts prosodic range is prodigiousshe moves in poetic forms as naturally as a body moves in its skin even as her lines ring with the cadenced authority of a gifted and schooled ear. Here in her words the iambic ground bass is in its vital questioning mode: The hearts insistent undersong: how live?/how live? How live? this poetry serves no lesser necesssity than to ask that.Eleanor WilnerBetween us how we wrestle over words Strain to wring some blessing from the silence Deliverance from violence its fear its lure The tyranny of names: night day Sable and alabaster flint shale Steel and lace. Who among us can afford To speak the languageany languagerightly? As if it werent enough to bear one heart Eternally divided in its chambers? We stand close enough to touch. We do Not touch. Between us burns a sword of fire A rusted turnstile glinting in the sun.