Review of A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow

• Published:
  1. Pleiades, January 01, 2008
• Metainfo:
  • 855 words
  • 28.5 inches

Inasmuch as Noah Eli Gordon plays a kind of sensual archaeologist to the worn-down landscapes of language in his new collection, "A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow," the title is a gross-fangled reflection of his poetry's more dainty excavation of the referent. He scratches away at bones, words, colors, and semi-quavers buried beneath the cracked land that obstructs like the dizzying sheen of the systematic modes Benjamin called "language"—the visual arts, mathematics, spoken and written English, etc.