Line to Curve

Line and curve evolve and collide in varied forms in Anna Reckin's second collection. Paintings slip into landscapes, rooms slide into pattern, a Chinese jade cup is pool, blossom and branch; an orange tips into a knife, a space station makes a gash in the sky. These are poems that balance precision with fluidity. `Out there, where you are,' Reckin points out, you may or may not be able to see the edges. Rather like an intricate and ever-surprising fabric, pulled looser and then tautened, this is poetry of rich and exceptional poise. Phrases, words, even letters are given the space to breathe and resonate. Anna Reckin's work refers to transposing, playing, gathering and carving; remarkably the poems themselves accomplish all such gestures in their dialogue with the materiality of the world. Highly recommended. -Moniza Alvi Anna Reckin's magnificent new collection, Line to Curve, unfolds in the formal arch and tensile arabesque of poetry's visual and sonic fields, which Reckin explores with piquant, pointed wit. `You've heard of linear'? she asks in one poem: `this is backwards'! A delicately expansive form tracks the `mind's // sharps', the eyes' painterly survey of colour-filled environs where Reckin discovers `the subtle syntax' of light burnishing the beautiful, spare spaces among garden and hearth, creating the shapes, surfaces, and textures of living in poems of scrupulous detail and largesse of vision. -Cynthia Hogue, author of In June the Labyrinth See more