Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge

Berssenbrugge, like so many poets of her generation, investigates perception; also the relationships among world (matter); image (thought, art)and symbol(word,name). Early on, her poetry becomes discursive, long-lined; almost prose. It concerns itself with light, color, landscape, bodies, shadows, in short, artists' materials. I like the floating almost fog-like consciousness of many of the poems collected here (indeed, one poem is titled Fog); they permeate, insinuate but don’t exactly locate or substantiate. In many ways, the exact opposite or complement of mathematical precision, yet steeped in notions of biology, geology, and astrophysics. Her poetry has an astronomical ambiance. It floats between earth and sky, always located elsewhere yet coming to ground. In a way, it resembles light itself, neither here nor there but transiting through, moving onwards and outwards, away, never returning unless reflected (in the mirror). Memory also plays an important role in Berssenbrugge's poetry, but hers is not a journalistic memory that records experience but rather memory as the agency that holds the world intact (in an image).
Another of Berssenbrugge’s preoccupations is space, its arrangement and ordering; the eye’s rearrangement of space; also the spatial (and thus, emotional) relations between one thing and another. Where something is placed or occurs is consequential, since it determines or at least affects how the eye of the I “sees” it. Space and perspective affect the intensity, dimension and proximity of thoughts/emotions.
Intriguingly, Berssenbrugge’s poetry manages to be ungraspable (and in this, quasi-hallucinatory) yet, at the same time, grounded and material. Although I often have no idea what her poems exactly mean, a phrase will engender a notion or an experience in my mind, so that in some indefinable way, I know what she’s talking about.
… (mere)