When Blue Light Falls

As `blue comes on' in these elegies, a unique genre emerges, a lyrical epic that speculates on a world imagined through the physics of blue light, `cyanometrics', the blue waves of the spectrum, shorter and faster moving when split from the norm of white light. In this new, formative referential world of blue, perception changes. As Carol Watts thinks blue, and makes strange cognitive experience, the long-held European myth of the power of vision as a knowledge-making faculty dissolves, along with the confident centrality of the perceiving subject. There is no `I' in this work, the first person is eliminated. In this new space/time of her enigmatic lyrics a spare, cryptic language evolves. Just as blue comes to us through the earth's atmosphere, scattered by molecules, the words on the page are like particles, suspended by a minimal syntax. So we discover new relations. With its charge of blue, the four parts of the poem move from speculation to threnody and even to prophecy as the earth's atmosphere that hosts light gradually takes on ecological terror. This terror penetrates to inner and to civic lives, to networks of finance and to myths of gender. This is a major philosophical poem of our generation. - Isobel Armstrong See more