You know what they say about minimalist poems...

Curtis Faville, over at his blog The Compass Rose, writes about Mark Truscott’s new book, Nature, in terms of a history “minimalist” poetry. This history, according to Faville, includes but is not limited to poets such as Aram Saroyan, Robert Grenier, Cid Corman, Robert Creeley, and others. The poems seem to be characterized by an attention to detail which highlights the “mysterious connections in our language, hidden beneath the layers and folds of presumption and quotidian use.” Faville re-types some examples from Truscott’s book, and writes:

as easy as such poems often look, their apparent adroit nonchalance is not simply attained. I like the way that the concentration upon a few words begins to imply the building up of architectural metaphors out of the letters themselves, as if the literal fact of the oscillation of certain phonetic/visual associations becomes a part of the process of the eye's progress across, down, through, under, and diagonally athwart the poem's ostensible setting.