Roxi Power

“Who sits absorbed, / inside sound’s centerless, edgeless surround?” Roxi asks in an elegy for her mother that serves as the titular poem for her new collection The Songs that Objects would Sing. In these poems Roxi watches or listens intently to the “strange music” that drags us, the “jangle of broken and reconstituted / memories, fairly new to this aperture” that is modern life, anxious with all its myriad mediations, “A roll of presence infiltrated by scratch and origin / Ominous horizon unfolding in rhythm.” In the “stationary facts” of ephemeral life that we eternally take for granted – “the sonorous trickle of stream”, the “bird sound, leaping from dog sound”, the leaf’s “green & green & green / without end” – she improvises into “this continuity whose music cannot be / rehearsed” until we too hear it – “the hum, the heartbeat” – “Grace. That old note, that old snatch of song that takes you there will return and return. Though you will not”