Lyric Multiples

“What do you want poetry to do?” George Albon inquires in the final line of this wide-ranging work. It’s a further—almost vertiginous—opening of the aperture he’s already stretched so wide for us. Where does the lyric begin; where does it live; what can it do; why do we go to it? The text approaches these questions by dropping us into domains ostensibly outside of lyric—though in the end, one realizes that the lyric has never been left. Albon assembles a hybrid landscape, making gestures and suggestions marked by a quiet urgency, but no claims beyond the aspirational. I don’t think it’s a stretch to call this a devotional work: a faithful “getting toward a poem-thing” in which the arrival is ultimately kept open. I suggest you read this one slowly—to experience how nothing goes still each time the book is closed.

Crafted in vivid prose that reflects and further encourages climates of inquiry and states of hidden affiliation, Lyric Multiples is a capacious and open-ended view into the life forms that animate poetic practice. A writer graced with breadth of mind and commitment, Albon is a phenomenologist attuned to everyday particulars and to the place-specific estrangements in such time as that engendered by emergency, inclination, and encounter. This is a profound work, complex and cannily observed, a landscape welcoming of art’s lived circumstance and of the poetic word’s unlived potential, always forthcoming.