The Blue Absolute

Review by Nicholas Alexander Hayes

The Blue Absolute is a languid historical symphony. Shurin’s images flow in these prose poems.  He exploits the affordances of the prose poem form – the nature of the lines without breaks to drive images and actions through their dramatic transformations. At times, he handles this change with a deftness that draws me back over the passages as a metonym of green eyes becomes self and mother.

He is playful in this longer work “Shivers” acknowledging being “pulled into threads, or you in your smoke drift who have come so far to read the clouds and stars in their formation on a page…” As Part I ends, Shurin playfully alludes to formulas in academic writing, announcing what the reader can expect in Part II and Part Seven. The poems have Whitmanesque gravity in that draws everything into their orbit. This force allows him to infuse his poem about San Francisco with anthropic imperative.

Shurin’s prose poems lend themselves to the dreamlike fluidity frequent in the genre. They are conversational and often elliptical. The line of flight drives the speaker across the page sometimes into metamorphosis and sometimes across objective correlatives. The elegance of these shifts and leaps provide a conceptual rhythm that is consistent throughout the collection, revealing the poet’s steady hand and sure craft.

But delightfully – and seriously – the work permits complexity and acknowledges imperfection within the subjects. This is aptly encapsulated in the line “…the fiction of me is merely your pleasure in deconstructing the violent world, so I dance with arms akimbo in an interrogative stance, and sing out of tune.” Typical verse with its use of white space can catch the eye as some poets jeté from word to word and the use of traditional poetic techniques like enjambment can reveal sonic pirouettes. Shurin accomplishes analogous movement in prose.

The Blue Absolute
Aaron Shurin
Nightboat Books
ISBN: 9781643620169