One reader’s lesson in ego
A Contrary review by Shaindel Beers


Petals of Zero Petals of One
Andrew Zawacki
Talisman House
2009
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Andrew Zawacki and his brilliant third book are everything the blurbs on the back cover proclaim: “a poet of startling, exhilarating capacity,” “aesthetically and ethereally beyond the terrestrial,” and so on. My main critique isn’t of Zawacki’s work, however, but of myself. I’ll admit that I had to look up at least three words per page, and if I were going to be completely honest, the number would be much higher than that. In fact, I read most of Zawacki’s book with a Google window open and the word “definition” in the search box, ready for me to plug in various terms as needed.

Zawacki has what seems to be an inexhaustible breadth of knowledge. Of the terms that I had to look up, some were from meteorology, others were from mineralogy, botany, and religion, and I would consider myself to be a fairly well-read, educated person. What I’m not sure of, it seems, is who will be Zawacki’s readers? Oh, by the way, there are passages in French as well, such as the epigraph of the book, so I had to enlist the help of friends as well as online French-to-English dictionaries.

I’m not trying to deter readers from Zawacki’s work. On the contrary, it’s absolutely beautiful. There are passages in the first long poem, “Georgia,” that are breathtaking, such as:

I walk wolfstep into the shadow Georgia
the nodding orchestral branches
shellacked as if a fountain turned and forced its gravity turn (4)

And there’s a clever irony at work here. Later, in the same poem, Zawacki writes, “I know almost nothing of language Georgia” (25), though, clearly, he knows far more about language than most of us.

This collection is an exploration of binaries, the very title coming from the lines:

	An explosive packed in a microchip
	petals of 0 petals of 1
	rips a hole of a fractal dimension (7)

Later, in the same poem, the insider/outsider status is explored again:

		I unlatch the window
		it sticks Georgia
		sometimes I see past the paint flecks Georgia
		and sometimes the pane is the object I see (10)

One has to be comfortable with the fact that this collection is about exploring, about uncertainty. It is easy to feel ungrounded in a poetry collection composed of three long poems with minimal punctuation (if ampersands and colons count as punctuation).

            The second poem “Arrow’s Shadow” is a masterpiece of wordplay, reminiscent of Susan Howe’s work:

the ana-
gram and gram
     -mar of mar-
 	   gins and mar-
  igolds  (35)

There are parts of this work that rely less on wordplay but are nonetheless playful in their use of image and sound:

compact discs in the cherry tree
  if only the electric lines
                                              if only the birds if
                                                     only the birds
                                             sequencing in ultra-
             sound and laying down a synco-
                                     pated lead soprano track

if only the wrens as bottle rocket
     as pinball eave to eave
    the morning’s gramophone booting up (36)

            Just as someone who doesn’t get modern art can tell that there’s something brilliant going on in a Kandinsky, I can tell that Andrew Zawacki is someone I should be reading. I just hope that some editorial decisions can be made in the future—perhaps more endnotes for those of us who aren’t as well-rounded. I also feel that a book consisting of three long poems of this depth may be far too difficult for unseasoned readers. “Georgia” and “Arrow’s Shadow,” the first two poems of the book, take up 59 pages, which is a respectable collection on its own. The inclusion of a third long (and not as strong poem), “Storm, Lustral: Unevensong,” seemed a bit of a letdown. After concentrating for 59 pages of arduous going, I was ready to see if Zawacki had other tricks to teach me, and, it seemed, he didn’t. I know that some readers wouldn’t have endured as long. Even a third section of shorter poems rather than another long poem would have given readers a different type of mental stimulation.

 	I want readers to read Zawacki, but I hope Zawacki and his future publishers can meet us somewhere in the middle by providing the tools we need to make the journey through one of his full-length volumes. Until then, I’ll be going back over the vocabulary list I made up from Petals of Zero Petals of One. Unfortunately, I know that too many readers’ egos will keep them from reading his work, or admitting that it’s tough going.



Poetry Editor Shaindel Beers's poetry collection, A Brief History of Time, was published in 2009 by Salt. Her official author site can be found at http://shaindelbeers.com
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WINTER 2010 COVER

THREE POEMS
SHERMAN ALEXIE

INCIDENT IN A TRAVEL AGENT’S
EDWARD MC WHINNEY

QUESTIONS
ANNA POTTER

THE ROCK, A DOUBLE ABECEDARIAN
LEAH WELBORN

ALLEGORY
KIKI PETROSINO

THE SAW LADY
ALEX CIGALE


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WITOLD GOMBROWICZ
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J.D. ABEL
KEVIN GOODAN
FRANCESCA KAY
BEN YAGODA
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