Murmur & Crush

Like photogravures, the images of Murmur and Crush etch memory and landscape into indelible emotional content. The road, once, the fields, now, a boy, an afternoon, wings, horses, orchards, and ladders appear and disappear, woven into reoccurring motifs, always unexpected and elemental. These poems implicate the world broadly but depict it intimately. They exist in the past and present at once. Here, Janson writes, Truth's got a murky taste. As poet Carol Potter says of this collection, "The joy we find... is an earned joy; rapture in spite of the demise of everything." We're all/ pilgrims, Janson writes, Sometimes we're incandescent. Maya Janson's richly evocative poems embody through visible things the turbulent cross-currents of the interior world where even on a good day obsessions pile up/like wrecked cars on a freeway in the fog; where, in the mind behind your mind, one thing spawns another in a wild tumult of images--impassioned, improbable, playful, intuitive, revelatory: the unbidden, the not-searched-for, producing an exuberant vision of beauty outlasting what destroys it: Though the garden is stockpiling beetles, /the rose maintains its posture of durable bliss. - Eleanor Wilner Wide-open love of the world and its mad inhabitants is one of the holiest of the heart's affections. And that's what you get in Maya Janson's Murmur and Crush-total acceptance of the as-is world, seduced into being by that beautiful tag team, Bemusement and Sorrow. I love the arc of these poems, how an image plunges through the opening of each one and begins to transform itself in ways that are always surprising but inevitably true. Splintered, as she says, but not wholly undone. This is a book with energy and verve to spare. - David Rivard