Invasive Procedures - Nan Socolow

“A poem is like a chunk of raw marble.” Nan Socolow chips and chips away at that chunk, and it takes form and becomes smaller, and smaller still, and when nothing further can be chipped away—when only the finest essence of a marble scrap is left—that is her poem: less is more.

Alternatively, an entire poem will write itself around an object, like a sliver of dried up soap or a yellow-crowned night heron “stalking on the sand” outside her window. As a result, Socolow’s poems are short and pert, sweet and sour as if laced with passion fruit. She pounces upon certain moments, capturing them in her net when no one else is looking, as Nabokov captured his butterflies.

The language is jubilant, exploding into alliteration, ecstasy, and irony as she plucks images from the air that she has so amply breathed throughout her eventful, celebratory life. Her words and music are original and powerful, image and sound playing between past and present, old age and youth, life and death, tragedy and comedy. She writes of nature, marriage, parenting, aging, death, subjects that are part of all our lives, all familiar but addressed with a tinge of irony and a dose of astute perception.

And, of course, she writes of love, of the joys and sorrows of lust, romance, courtship, marriage, heartbreak, disappointment, and separation. Hers is the voice of someone who has lived and observed life closely and fully and has distilled a wry, sophisticated, and acute understanding of the world and of life itself.