Books
Ange Mlinko
Foxglovewise
In a recent review of novelist László Krasznahorkai’s work, American poet Ange Mlinko described how, when she first read his Seiobo There Below she thought she had discovered “a sutra of a cult I had been unconsciously following for most of my life” – that of being “the artist who is no more, who is invisible, who is needed by no one”.
A key motif for this invisible 21st century artist in Seiobo There Below is a white heron elegantly stalking fish in the middle of high-speed Kyoto. Mlinko’s feeling of kinship with the framing of the artist-bird as a precise yet marginalised instrument tells you something crucial about her new collection, Foxglovewise, especially in a time when the humanities, a little like the natural world itself, are being attacked from seemingly any inane and boosterish quarter.
Mlinko is both a versatile formalist and a place-based writer. Her versions of the Florida region emphasise its lurid tourism and fecund biota but also the rich palimpsest of excursionist poets she has deliberately inherited as a geo-canon – Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, James Merrill, and so on. Mlinko has explored the Florida of these poets in her book of essays, Difficult Ornaments, and in the opening poem of Foxglovewise, “Tarpon Springs, Epiphany”, she presents us with five-year-old Mary Kalogeropoulos, later to become the diva Maria Callas, visiting the region wearing her first pair of glasses. Mlinko imagines the Greek–American diva as a fellow traveller – Mlinko’s lineage is Belarusian and Hungarian – watching local boys performing the ritual marine dive for Epiphany.
The operatic tension between motif and narrative in this poem is a signature of Mlinko’s technique, the image of the cross as an organic form persisting even as the boys dive, and even as the diva, with her “otherworldly ear”, becomes the singer who will sing with her glasses off, the La Scalas of her future imagined as a mythic blur of “gold-vermilion”. Such orchestrated imagery is the necessary ground of Mlinko’s considerable poetic wit. When the boys bear the winning cross-bearer on their shoulders back to the pier, it is telling that it is not the diva but local terns that are crossing their wings behind their backs. “Their X’d tips had a darker trim, as a soprano may have colours our ear discerns / when the language disappears in what she sings.”
As ongoing digital colonisations risk weakening our engagements with the complexity of life and art, the artisanal skill of Mlinko’s compositions could be deemed as unnecessary as Krasznahorkai’s totemic heron. But a little stillness and aesthetic appreciation is all that’s required for the uncanny metaphoric imagery to fly. The fact the book’s title emphasises a flower’s capacity for versatility is a clue to the way culture and nature are here fused. Give these poems a little more than a moment and they’ll stay with you for a lifetime.
Faber, 96pp, $26.99
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on April 19, 2025 as "Foxglovewise".
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