EROTIKON

Mitchell (Rapture, 1992) has published in respected literary reviews in the US and has won awards for her writing, including

fellowships from the NEA and Guggenheim Foundation. "Erotikon," she explains, is "a made-up word created by eliding erotic and ikon." The 23-page title poem, subtitled "a commentary on Amor and Psyche," is peppered with fleeting (and largely gratuitous) references to St. Augustine, Aristotle, Aeschylus, Milton, Catullus, Plato, and Apuleius—as if name-dropping would somehow justify the poem’s prosy meanderings through a quasi-classical world that never comes into focus. A passage detailing Mitchell’s fascination with "dictionaries of the erotic" contains the clunker, "Catullus could get away with a lot because he wrote in Latin"—a claim that, sadly enough, cannot be made for Mitchell. The opening lines of the book’s long first poem ("Bird: A Memoir") seem to indicate that what follows is a self-portrait, alter ego, or persona of the author: "If you go back far enough in my family tree there are birds. . . . / that move like shadows in the branches. How do I know this? / Is it something about the face that looks back at me / from mirrors? Something in the way I move? In my voice? / Yes, it’s true I can mimic their songs, but only / if I sip warm water first." The poem is strewn with archaic references (footnoted at the back) that never quite seem relevant, and many lines are crippled by tortured syntax: "Take, for example, the question of locus, blithe recitatives / of space where perch I." Come again? A bird perching on a blithe recitative of space?

This is a collection easy to live without.