Folklore

I confess I never do put Folklore all together. Its seams, though apparent, are rife with goods—so it hardly matters (“The brain is a delicate wind that surrounds hinge.”) I go to things like the lines toward the end of the book that read “Set out for & came back with. Hours. Is, is, and is. // Water has no answer. // Our great love.” And I put that next to the Hawthorne quote (out of The Marble Faun) that closes Folklore and reads in part “now that life had so much human promise in it, they resolved to go back to their own land; because the years, after all, have a kind of emptiness, when we spend too many of them on a foreign shore” and try to think that that—a sense of dislocation put against an impulverable history (green Albion in song and story) is one of the sources of the book, or one of its “meanings.”

John Latta on Tim Atkins' Folklore. More to read at his blog, Isola di Rifiuti.