Michal Collins reviews Franca Mancinelli’s « The Butterfly Cemetery » for « Exacting Clam »

• Post By: johntaylor
• Date: 6 mai 2023
• Category: News

The critic Michael Collins has reviewed Franca Mancinelli‘s The Butterfly Cemetery (The Bitter Oleander Press) for the journal Exacting Clam.

An excerpt: « Award winning poet Franca Mancinelli’s The Butterfly Cemetery, translated into English by John Taylor, collects thirteen years of prose writings including fiction, autobiography, and essays on writing. “Poetry, Mother Tongue” points toward one node of its connections, in its evocation of an interdependent relationship between one’s inner reader and writer: “More than in dreaming, the origin of poetry seems to lie on this threshold between sleeping and wakefulness, in which we are given back to ourselves, naked, entirely and now only a gaze, entirely and only listening” (133). In a formal mirroring of these assertions, a common feature throughout this varied collection is the presence of open, unspoken space that allows—in fact, requires—the reader to think through correlations and implications and attend to emotional and psychological resonances, often by immersing themselves both cognitively and emotionally in the experiences of images and scenes. . . »