I picked up Laura Kilbride’s In the square (Punch Press, 2014) several years ago, but a succession of house-moves and other disruptions meant that I hadn’t properly read it until now. Which is my serious loss.
The book fell off the shelf while I was packing for a few days away, and I’ve been reading it obsessively ever since. It’s an extraordinary work: a thousand lines of intense, almost incantatory verse that seem propelled by their own sound-patterns and syntax even as they weave multiple conflicting meanings into a strange symphonic whole. Line after line pulls off the difficult trick of conveying its own necessity — the conviction that these words, and only these words, flow inevitably from the ones before, with an energy, harmony and syntactic strength that tirelessly keep bringing you back for more.
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