Guernica Editions

These poems, "Suffering efficiently the light," hold us to witness and to account. They render the inner and outer worlds we seek to navigate each day. Their sensory intimacies, especially their sonic landscapes, near and far in space and time, resonate with elemental and existential messages. Their rigor and tenderness mix mysteriously, unsettlingly. They are water, night, flight, rest, memory, dream. Read them and know.

With Swoon, Elana Wolff unveils long-held personal experiences, and wraps them in words that bring them into today and #MeToo awareness. Difficult elements from the past are balanced beautifully by her careful observations of birds and the cycles of nature. Whether praising or chastising the world, language is key, with the movement from one poem to the next as natural as breathing.

Alongside question marks, ellipses and white space together do “big work” in Swoon, perhaps marking a poetic mind’s unwillingness to settle for certainty’s premature closures. As one poet, John Keats, famously held, uncertainty is a prerequisite for literary achievement. Though Wolff seems at least as interested in negative space—to borrow the title of one of her poems—as negative capability. The collection is full of jagged juxtapositions, of lines that begin in the middle of the page, as if awoken.

Elana Wolff's poems yearn for transcendence, but they are too wise to expect it in the form of a lightning bolt. Instead they deftly evoke insights glimpsed on the periphery, the small startlings and veil-liftings that connect us to each other, to nature, to memory, to ideas beyond human understanding. Wherever they travel, they leave my senses tingling.

Yes, you don't want to keep this Wolff from thy door! Yes, you want to let her in—just as you want to let in sunlight and fresh air—because "Love is loopy like that. / Like punching Sun, / getting drubbed, blessing the light // that blinds." You want to delve into and collect the proverbs, "Remarkable yet ordinary: glass in a wooden casement." This goddess Wolff hath instructions— for Life, for Liberty: "A poet tried his life at vice and stayed / as guileless as a child ..." (O, Blake is prowling, pouncing, pronounce!) Do learn that "Those enfolded in / feeling are like those with no emotion at all: demolished." Wolff's tracks approach the scriptural: "I call it cunning: I like the femininity of that word, / its verbal noun-ness." So much wisdom is here for you to swoon over—with all-consuming Desire, with unfaltering Consummation, headlong and reckless, in the wreaking, in the taking; with unsullied shimmering—even with Threat—the ungovernable coffin—always impeding, aye, my darling!

Attentive to the mysteries of their worlds, the speakers in Elana Wolff’s sixth poetry collection, Swoon, incarnate the same sensual curiosity that characterized the author’s previous collection, Everything Reminds You of Something Else (Guernica, 2017). While that title announced Wolff’s penchant for allusive expression, Swoon suggests the affective experience centred in her searching, spiritual lyrics.

Building on her compulsion of perception in her fifth collection, Everything Reminds You of Something Else, and its spare, introspective, elliptical, and heart-probing lyrics, Swoon puts the reader “at the crux of wonderment/& tech sophistication,” with poems that are stunningly meditative, ekphrastic, and intense while being musical even in their intrinsic tensions.

Swoon comprises ekphrastic verses, philosophical considerations, meditations on the sacred and profane, and a subtle understanding of one’s own connection to the world.

These poems are definitely feminine and feminist: “Call it sense for survival, if you like, / / I call it cunning: I like the femininity of that word, / its verbal noun-ness.” Another point of generosity comes from Wolff sharing with the reader aspects of her poetics: “Is it / / the verb that does the big work? as some poets hold…” The reader also gets a sense of the poet's use of ellipses, caesura, and metrical feet. The collection itself, of course, is an expression of Wolff’s poetics, but in a specific way.