Follow-Haswed by Laura Walker

Excerpts | Order

"Laura Walker’s poems take us directly to the prescient heart of poetry. First outcry, without scale or law. In the purity of ancient voiced song, crying out for no place to cry out. Unknowing. Her poems begin at Follow and pull through to Haswed, [from Vol. VI of OED], with precarious tipping forward into found meanings. Some poems, the smallest two lines, pitch parts of speech and suture them to hold us inside her vast sorrow voice—far back in a particular history of loss with the sudden joy that made it so. Repetitions of words quietly insist, words in un/dictated return; or dark. Unrepentant. The story of a singular pushing through against the flaring of historical moment: “not to have survived/ to sing”. Re Haswed, you are asked to follow, and again follow. This is an unforgettable book in the highest tradition of break-through art."

—Kathleen Fraser