Woven from dreamlike and echoing images,After Imagetravels between life and death, between a living body and its absence.
A house, an orchard, “a shudder of blossoms. A fountain, a bed, a sudden spring snow. Carefully woven from a dreamlike set of images which echo and reconfigure throughout the collection, the poems in Jenny George'sAfter Imagehug the cusp between life and death, between a living body and its absence. “And in the space / left behind— Time slips. Eurydice muses on the gestures of the living, and we look out from inside the removed head of Orpheus. The laughing gods and the furies make appearances too, and the poet's persona appears as its own character—the observing self, navigating the strangenesses of grief's terrain. Unsentimental yet pulsing with love, each cutting and transcendent poem is relentless in its willingness to see, to hold both the impossibility and inevitability of transformation. In scenes that hover between the ordinary, the imagined, and the unknowable, and with George's sly, meticulous simplicity,After Imageasks what lingers in the face of death and what falls away.
US
TIN BUCKET
The world is not simple.
Anyone will tell you.
But have you ever washed a person's hair
over a tin bucket,
gently twisting the rope of it
to wring the water out?
At the end of everything,
dancers just use air as their material.
A voice keeps singing even
without an instrument.
You make your fingers into a comb.
ORPHEUS ASCENDING
A crack appeared.
Beyond it, snow was pouring through the spring sunlight.
A brigl“Ď