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OVERVIEW
The work of creating a fully habitable life with a past and present preoccupies
Sonja Greckol. In Gravity Matters, the poet traces an arc: from a
nineteenth-century European family that immigrated and settled in central
Alberta to a digitized wondering held together by Skype and Google rooted in
central Toronto. In this, a first collection, Greckol turns obliquely from the
matters of largely personal lyrics to historical and international
preoccupations that, nevertheless, remain embodied—a pentimento of certainties,
sensualities and queries, empiricism and theory in science, moving from daughter
to mother and then mother/daughtering once again—in a feminist voice that is
urgent, empathic and wry. An intricate and technically near-flawless first
collection of poetry by a poet whose work has been published in prestigious
literary journals across the country.
“Sonja Greckol’s intricate, sonorous poems probe the ‘multiplied forces’
engaged in a continually placed and displaced twenty-first-century embodied
feminist consciousness. From tender ‘motherwatch’ grapplings with her
daughter’s intentions of development work in war-scarred Rwanda, to identity
traced in and out of alignment with intergenerational bloodroot, to naming
vivid shudders of post-menopausal eros, this book invites the reader’s mindbody
to come hither and matter as much. Greckol’s poems track oft-opposing impulses
for both ‘gravity and flight,’ as she imagines what it is to stand at both
sides of the barricades inside our own consciousness, calibrating the complex
weave of reason and rapture. A gorgeous, intelligent churner of a debut.”
—Margaret Christakos
“Sonja Greckol’s lines glance off The Real like a chisel blade to create their
own particular music and forms of exploratory feeling, “carrying banners around
those frozen walls in the twilight.” History and personal history, defiant elegy
and hymns to the warmly embodied self, Gravity Matters manages to find the
charged moment, goes to work there, ‘offer[ing] whiskey with poppy seed cake’.
We feel this gravitational pull, as readers; an altering, cumulative wind
unveiling the sly half-truth in, ‘zephyr shivers/the copse/on the landfill,/and
no/thing changes,/apparently’. These poems are honest, unafraid of the mistakes
in a life, the missteps of memory.”
—Ken Babstock
“These are poems about survival—which is to say, poems about grief and how the
soul survives it. ‘When he is dog meat, she weeps // at the cruelty of farming:
the horse without / wings cannot be saved by naming.’ All the themes of this
book are triumphantly summed up and extended in its central poem, Greckol’s
haunting, monumental ‘Emilie Explains Newton to Voltaire.’ With eloquence and
unceasing formal invention, the horse with wings (Pegasus, or poetry) tries to
save mortal life by naming what it was.”
—Frank Bidart
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