John Taylor on Maja Vidmar’s « The Gift of Delay » (Dalkey Archive Press) / The Antioch Review

• Post By: johntaylor
• Date: 12 mai 2019
• Category: News

John Taylor has reviewed Maja Vidmar’s The Gift of Delay (Dalkey Archive Press) in his « Poetry Today » column in the Antioch Review (Winter 2019). An excerpt:

« Vidmar’s poetry is filled with delicate ironies and subtleties. The subtleties are not only psychological in nature, but also existential and even ontological. Our experience of being alive in the world is like this: it is not clear-cut, but rather ambivalent, woven with inner contradictions and ignorance (about the ‘specific speeds’ of our own lives, for example); and this apparently inescapable condition presents itself to consciousness especially when we suddenly become aware that we are in the process of experiencing the world, not to mention of loving another person. We see, hear, smell, touch, taste, and think, and sometimes catch ourselves engaged in these processes; we step back, as it were, and observe the processes as they continue: and these moments of heightened awareness raise doubts about the reality of what is going on or, at the minimum, give us a ‘funny feeling’ about our relationship to the world and to ourselves. Vidmar excels at conjuring up such moods, reflections, and self-reflexive apperceptions — and provoking them in her readers. »