Thursday, January 11, 2018

New Letters publishes Denise Low's review of Lombardo's Sappho

I appreciate the elegant journal New Letter's publication of my review of Stanley Lombardo’s
translation Sappho: Complete Poems and Fragments (Hackett) for the new issue of New Letters. Here is a brief excerpt:
"Lombardo deliberately composes pages of the least complete fragments to preserve placements of text. This creates a field of inverse lacuna, as the few remaining words appear within the larger gaps of loss. This is a collage effect. Susan Howe’s 2017 book Debths has a similar, deliberate effect. She composes pages of white space and text clippings, some lines smudged beyond recognition. She explains the bricolage sections: 'Our eyes see what is outside in the landscape in the form of words on paper but inside, a slash or mark wells up from a deeper place where music before counting hails from' (22)." The complete text of the review is a PDF on the New Letters website.  New Letters v. 84, no. 1 (2017-18): 131-4.