review by: Hugh Fox
2009; 65 pp; CavanKerry
Press, 6 Horizon Rd. #2901,
Fort Lee, New Jersey 07024 .
$16.00.

You may find the book here

  Lamon reminds me a lot of Lyn Strongin, one of those poets who takes everyday reality and turns it into word magic. The English language is no longer Basic English for the likes of my Taiwanese, Japanese, Slovakian, Brazilian students, but for language-explorers who want to rocket out into Language Experiment Space and see just how far language can go and what it can be twisted into:

              smell of clay, the rim
              of sky unable to close
              weight’s leaf edge --
                    light against a wall,
              a cup, crease of porcelain
              slip......

                      (“Reading the Poem,” p.22)


  Sometimes Lamon begins sounding like ordinary coffee-/street- talk, but invariably/inevitably moves into outer space experiments that revise the whole historical thrust of language:

              Pain thinks of death

              without sound the extant
              waves grotto & linden
              without trespass the mind
              without evidence a voice
              the eye nothing of light’s

                                  2.


              povery Pain thinks of death
              without poverty without
              tenor a word’s infinite space

              the breath crowding in.


      All of which I applaud because I’ve had enough of (thinking of John Bennet here) “shards” (the word Bennett uses to describe all this poetry) that are nothing but pure everyday REALITY, like the day’s newspaper, evening TV news condensed into a few heart-penetrating lines.
      Contemporary art....take artist Anne Wilson, composer Daniel Hessel, writers like Kostelanetz and Sonnenfeld...it’s all going into post-logic, intuitive, dreamlike-nightmarish super-anti-logistics.
      Lamon is part of the post-post game, but, like Lyn Strongin, she still retains enough sequentiality and real-world relatedness to get to you when she wants (after a bit of meditation):
      the hillside tomb broken and stripped beneath stone
      against stone Pain reads turning the page every
      corridor broken the fracture and tongue the obelus
      broken without season of light without darkness
      buried as the house is buried without dedication
      of season Pain reads without trace without gather
      of light and the tomb without stone.

                            (“Pain Thinks of Eschatology,” p. 43.,)