Once Written - Liber Scretarium

Poetry. Serge Gavronsky's ONCE WRITTEN - LIBER SCRETARIUM (the Latin phrase translates as 'a book of secrets') may well give you one of the strangest reading experiences you'll ever have. Gavronsky is a poet of receptivity, of impingements and of on-the-spot awareness. Our engarbled languages seem to fall into his pages like sub-atomic particles arriving from the cosmos of daily speech, from our data-driven and pre-encoded worlds. His stance is inevitably combative, swatting away at our usual conventions of discourse. 'Situate / Then / Destroy, ' he writes, as if meaning or sense must be picked over and re-arranged from the word-hoard's rubble. His short mostly haiku-sized stanzas are endlessly gnomic and often comically inscrutable. Linked or unlinked-and often one can't tell-the lines lead away from the romancings and pleasing pastorals that make up our typical poetic fictions. And yet these compact stanzas have their own strange beauty, as though a full embrace of language's otherness were an act of linguistic salvation. 'Quit yourself, ' he advises, with an echo of Louis Zukofsky whom Gavronsky has co-translated into elegant French, 'Endless beginnings / Here I hear no / paradox / Only doors opening.'--Michael Heller