A first reading of Larissa Szporluk’s work always sends me back for more of its oblique seductions. Her poems withhold and disclose with equal intrigue, and their flickering gestures of reserve and revelation entice me to read again.
This particular group begins with the calmly comely “Faire Faire,” whose title would seem to evoke the tropes of justice, beauty, and time that figure throughout Szporluk’s work. That this reading rests upon a false etymology does not dispel its suggestive power. As far as I can tell, it was the noun rather than the adjective “fair” that sported a final “e” in Middle English. The noun “faire” referred to a holiday (or holy day) when people stood outside the diurnal constraints of work. Whichever way you read it, the title “Faire Faire” arrives from the archaic recesses of English, the realm of darkling, bide, and whence. Its extemporal presence reminds me of the “liquid mementos” found in gems: inclusions that encapsulate and remember traces of the stone’s formation. Like those remnants, discrete words and phrases in Szporluks poetry serve to imply the poem’s relationship to temporality with elegance and brevity rather than with narrative and exposition.
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