Aaron Shurin (Flower & Sky: Two Talks) dazzles the sense of self in his transportive and indelible poetry collection, The Blue Absolute.
Luscious prose poems populate the four sections of this book. Most entries stand like a single paragraph on the page the reader enters. By the end of each poem, a transformative magic has occurred. Shurin's sentences embrace the poet's surroundings--both pastoral and urban--with zeal and exuberant intelligence, showing how space relates to the self and expands it. These poems "flirt with distances" in a poetic dance, balancing the past, the "cargo of facts," with the depth of the present and possibilities of the future. "The Edge" reveals what the poet uncovers with the force of his imagination: "a perfectly unzipped set of affirmations." Likewise, in "Clear," the ultimate purpose is "seizing the husk of every disappearing hour."
Shurin is a gay writer, and a certain eroticism animates these poems. His attempt to "make the walls sing" reveals a deep well of life force, sexually charged but also reaching heights of universal love, the same way his poetry mixes the sensuous with the abstract, until the whole world seems to be throbbing with life. The end of the collection is a five-part poem called "Shiver"--structured differently than the other poems--dedicated to San Francisco, "to meet the city that made me and that I make."
Taken together, the poems in The Blue Absolute are liberating in the way they lean toward sky, breaking ceilings and conjuring the absolute richness of the moment. Shurin is a bright voice in the wilderness, one that illuminates and builds worlds with words. --Scott Neuffer, writer, poet, editor of trampset