Ocean Avenue

By Malena Mörling

Book Overview

The poet's sense of wonder is contagious whether she views the world from her seat on a train, from the window of her apartment, or from the streets of the city. Through a subtle, mediated surrealism, M rling reins in the urban landscapes of New York, drawing the reader into her meditations on the temporal and the spatial, on language itself.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0932826709
• ISBN13: 9780932826701
• Release Date: March 1999
• Publisher: New Issues Poetry and Prose
• Length: 75 Pages
• Weight: 0.84 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.4" x 8.9"
• Age Range: 15 years and up

Customer Reviews

In admiration of Morling's accomplishment

In OCEAN AVENUE, Malena Mörling captivates us with an eyeful of American urbanity-crowds, traffic, pigeons. But the cumulative effect is not "the color of pavement" (20). Mörling's muscle as an observer lies in her selection of detail, as well as her imaginative empathy. She's drawn to the human experience; one may be reminded of Whitman's Civil War poems. Mörling is well aware of life's harsh realities-violence, poverty, loneliness, private suffering-as seen in poems "Among Pillars of Dust" and "For Bartleby." And because Mörling is conscious of her own mortality ("First Thought," "Visiting," "Three Daffodils," "Let Me Say This"), she expresses a greater sense of immediacy by rightly speaking in the present tense. No wonder she chants her own version of carpe deum: "Walk more slowly now" (20). But what I admire most is the way Mörling treads "between two contraries," as Robert Hass might say, by letting the world speak through her, while also claiming certain universals-which simply means: "...we still ask the questions: / `Where do we come from? / Who are we? / Where are we going?'" (59).

Beautiful and simple

Morling's poems are are fresh and deceptively simple, and alive. There are definite overtones of Eastern philosophy and religion here, as in the superb "Standing on the Earth Among the Cows." Ocean Avenue is full of careful observation, celebration of the everyday. A great new voice and a generous new heart in American poetry.

Beautiful, fresh and perceptive.

A beautiful book dealing lightly with dark subjects, filled with fresh modifiers, weighty conclusions, and perceptions as intense as a child's. Morling holds onto things that have passed through most of us, weighs them, and puts them on shelves so we can look at them again. Great stuff!