My Archipelago
"Consciousness experienced as language." A collection of experimental short poems of musicality and quietude, though an uncloistered quiet, despite the presence of a nun making whiskey at a still in the opening piece. These short bursts of lyrical sound and fragmented images create a wholeness with an implicit, intuitive narrative whose meaning may not necessarily be apparent while they sing to you, but which, all together, describe a world of variety within her mind’s archipelago--nodding its thanks throughout to Wallace Stevens and Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Reviews
… the voice, the repetitions and the surprising turns, a sense of surprise, and in the end, a sense of community … a moment of perception, the mind surprised by one thing then the next and next,.
—James McKean
Rantala has, as a mature poet must, surmounted her influences to create a personality of language all her own. She is a poet who walks through the world and history, intently looking, listening, and feeling. What a fine adventure she has made of her life, as she sits and composes at what she calls due balconi, in Edmonds, Washington, a short walk from Puget Sound, where my favorite poem, The Land of Chinoiserie, may have arrived like an Annunciation
—Norman Lock
The Land of Chinoiserie
Alive the succulent crustacean
red box
fisted bee
the hinge of paper
nothing to the steep light
Excerpt
41.7498° N, 12.6485° E
[Gandolfo, Italy]
morning evening blue orange Tuscany
Bologna
gold and red
Venezia enmasked
floods and
south the Minotaur
and
no end to it