Fire Break

George Albon’s utterly distinct poetry takes us through the tactile labyrinth to show us a “prehensile glimpse/ on the edge of eternity.” Albon constructs a strange and complex world in the fullness of his inquiry: listening with “ears askew,” this poet topples the assumptions with which we typically question and essays a “study of the vanished/ overtaken by intensities.” It takes a poet of exceptional skill and attunement to articulate, amid the world’s chaos, what the rest of us fail even to register. Fire Break is a consummate demonstration of what poetry can do while “inventing/ under/ duress.

Let melody stand for attachment”—as a phrase it’s a credo and poetics, at once making melos the means and measure of the poet’s relation to his environs. And though George Albon indeed puts language as made thing between observer and world, he does so in order to examine our attachments rather than eschew them. “No sooner written,” he writes, “than contended.” He crafts poems so perceptually rich and critically canny that they everywhere render the complexities of affect coded as music, “resonance merging/ with its being/ struck.” As attuned to “the mercantile/ world working” as to the erotics of “literal skin” Fire Break reminds us of the important Objectivist legacy Oppen and Rakosi left on the West Coast. Few are more their heir than George Albon.