PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, p. 79 (August 30, 1999)
by Anonymous
Nimble invention and linguistic play flourish in
Parisian writer Cadiot's collection of 14 long poems,
first published in French in 1988. The poems embark on
extemporaneous, often puckish, inquiries about the world
using a language that continually rediscovers the pleasure
of its own game, while finding adventure in the most
unassuming of phrases and experiences.
Cadiot's desire
for knowledge in the face of his understanding that "one
can't know all that goes on / there" leads him to revisit,
diagram and permute ordinary phenomena and motifsblue
skies, storms, dresses, letter writing, waiting, the
historical Peter and Paulin an effort to sort through
the simultaneous perspectives and alternatives of everyday
events.
The result is a fugue of musical and visually innovative
lines that call to mind both the descriptive observational
writings of Francis Ponge and the temporal obsession of
Marcel Proust. In "(n-1)," the accessible directness of propositions
such as "There are more books in a bookstore than in a library /
There are fewer trees in the garden than in the orchard /
There's a huge crowd. There was a huge crowd" unfolds artlessly
into understatements of speculative, metaphysical wonder:
"There's someone in the garden. Is there someone in the garden?"
Other peoms like "bla-bla-bla" and "The Tempest" apply rules
of mathematical induction and propositional logic to an endlessly
generative flux of grammatical transpositions, inversion, conju-
gations and restatements, suggesting that the passage from one
known reality to the next might be accomplished through a mere
difference of words: "I am building a house by the sea / could
mean: / (1) I am building the house myself / or (2) I am having
the house built / To know the world is an enriching thing." With
humor and persistence, Cadiot's collection teases and challenges
the world it creates, inviting the reader to practice its
strange, familiar language.