Hum

Harvard Review, Dec, 2005 by Shrode Hargis

The best poems in Hum are those in which Lauterbach stages a fusion of the musical narratives representative of her early work and the "vocabulary of displacement" that runs throughout her most recent. Many of these poems consist of, as she puts it in her poem "Topos," a "plural wandering" that is reminiscent of Wallace Stevens (the same Stevens whom Pankey abandons in Reliquaries). "There is no span," she writes in "Event Horizon,"

    all arguments blur
    and lower life mildews along the riverbank
    and a figure goes on a rampage in the exhausted
    vocabulary of displacement

    the arc of the bridge has collapsed
    things remain under their masks

    there is neither the one nor the other with whom
    to flirt. This is what occurs, less than a horizon.

This is Ann Lauterbach at her best and provides a small taste of just one of the many mesmerizing journeys that can be found in Hum. Indeed, Lauterbach thrives when, rather than cataloguing the many possibilities of language, she leads the reader through the catalogue of worlds that language makes possible and therefore provides alternative perspectives "into" poetry and art and (why not?) life:

    Maybe what is interesting will also be beautiful
    although that is--
    that is:
    not to look out or at, but into.