on Ange Mlinko

Flamboyant Coincidence

As an asthmatic, I’m sensitive to changes in the air. Though never severely or dangerously difficult, my breathing is affected by humidity and sudden cold, pollen and wood smoke, perfume and cats, cigarettes, aerosol, dust and exhaust fumes. This may explain why my experience of reading Foxglovewise was one of noticing its atmospheres, ‘thick / and perfumed as an unguent’, ‘clammy with muscat fug’ – where even ‘The great refinery of sunset / leaves smoke and bilge in the sky’.

From ‘thermal curl[s]’ to ‘smudgy cigars’, Mlinko’s poems swirl with thickening agents, the air abuzz, ‘electric with bees’, flitting with ‘Hummingbirds and butterflies’, the sky, from time to time, amassing monstrous Texan thunderclouds, ‘spurting electricity’, whipping ‘sulfurous wind’. Meanwhile, constant sound and music: whether ‘the selfsame / chime’ of ‘owls and church bells’ or the poems’ tide of different languages – Greek and Spanish, snatches of Latin, a flurry of ‘old Scottish names’ – or simply ‘the crowd-roar’ and ‘announcer’s commentary’ blaring from an airport bar, Mlinko’s poetry is a cacophonous environment, where palm trees ‘start up like a band in a sudden breeze’, flooding ‘the gutters of the ears’.

The fullness of the air in Foxglovewise brings Bishop’s ‘Florida’ to mind, especially her ‘Thirty or more buzzards […] drifting down, down, down’, ‘like stirred-up flakes of sediment / sinking through water’, a viscous, liquid atmosphere, slow and subtropical. A current resident of Florida – ‘the state with the prettiest name’, according to Bishop – Mlinko appears drawn to the indeterminate nature of the landscape. Indeed, her latest ...