EXCURSIVE
by Elizabeth Robinson
Excursive roves through a miscellany of experience and observation, responding to everything from gerrymandering to Krakatoa to beauty. Robinson offers lyric responses and disruptions in a collection of poetry that observes and interrogates the world in poems that are by turns curious, indignant, irreverent, and tender.
The poems in Excursive appear as practical essays in the manner of Francis Bacon or Montaigne but in the spirit of Robert Duncan and contemporary poets concerned with what goes on day to day for the poet as a person in a world of archetypes. Her poems direct our attention to subjects diverse and miscellaneous or as her subtitle says, “on Abstraction, Entity, Experience, Impression, Oddity, Utterance, &c.” Her essays are not only practical, but in this world increasingly driven by fear, Robinson assures the reader that, “’World’ does not mean ‘harm.’”
People are Saying:
Alphabet book, subject primer, metaphysical tinderbox—Elizabeth Robinson’s Excursive is a protean engagement with worldly categories and interior placements. Finely contemplative but strongly embodied, the poems link among themselves, join one another’s tones, and develop coordinates for those spaces where “arrival is planted within another arrival.” It is left to the reader to chart the dimensions of Robinson’s itinerary, and to marvel at her convergent findings, her questing spirit, and her multiform consciousness. —George Albon
Reminiscent of Shonagon’s The Pillow Book, these poems do anything but rest their heads to sleep. Similar to Zuihitsu or “running brush” style—a running list of thoughts on things, the brush here runs, but also sings, pauses, takes the time to “change its lyric to the rhythm of our grievances,” to pre-verbally bite into things in order to “invoke speech of a different order.” Robinson’s collection Excursive catalogues her ponderings with precision. They run the gamut of observation on topics from cups to Krakatoa. A thoroughly thought-provoking read. —James Thomas Stevens
About the Author:
Elizabeth Robinson is the author of several collections of poetry, including the National Poetry Series Winner Pure Descent and the Fence Modern Poets Prize winner Apprehend. Her book On Ghosts (Solid Objects) was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times book award in poetry. With Jennifer Phelps, Robinson co-edited Quo Anima: innovation and spirituality in contemporary women’s poetry. Robinson has recently been recognized with a Pushcart Prize and Editor’s Choice awards from New Letters and Scoundrel Time.