Distant Mandate
Poems
ISBN10: 0374537739
ISBN13: 9780374537739
Trade Paperback
112 Pages
$19.00
CA$26.00
In Distant Mandate, Ange Mlinko moves between the tormented southern landscape, with its alternately arid and flooded scrublands, and the imaginative landscapes of Western art. Guided by her spiritual forbears—Orpheus, Mallarmé, Pound, Yeats, and others—Mlinko deftly places herself within the tradition of the poet in protest against the obduracy of the real.
Mlinko takes the title from a piece by Laszló Krasznahorkai on the unknowable origins of the Alhambra, the monument “for the sight of which there is only a distant mandate . . . [one] can see, in any event, the moment of creation of the world, of course all the while understanding nothing of it.” This distant mandate, also the “bitter ideal” of Mallarmé, is the foundation upon which all works of art are composed—the torment of eros and the intimation of war.
Myth is central to these poems; some are based on the story Cupid and Psyche, others serve as odes to Aphrodite or as explorations of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. In Distant Mandate, Mlinko has given us a shimmering and vibrant collection, one that shows us not only how literature imagines itself through life but also how life reimagines itself through literature.
Reviews
Praise for Distant Mandate
"Mlinko’s readers can easily spot the wit, the elegance, and the play in her poems . . . But she is also, in almost every line, funny, poignant, and self-impugning, measuring her pinprick dramas against the cosmos . . . Mlinko’s volume aches with pain, but its tone sometimes suggests the screwball comedy or 'merry war' of Shakespearean lovers . . . Mlinko’s poems are set all over, from Galveston to Marrakech, Cyprus to Crown Heights, and many points in between. Her extraordinary wit, monitoring its own excesses, is her compass . . . Mlinko’s book is a study of indecision, stalemate, truce: suspensions of cause and effect, like the levitating anvil in 'Cottonmouth,' that work for only so long. Poems are brutally aware of their short span of action; they’re terminal cases, but they bring the news of beauty."—Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker
"Mlinko repurposes the archaic and deposits the mythic into a contemporary space, crafting glimmering poems of scrupulous linguistic intricacy that transcend time . . . Seeking order within chaos, Mlinko layers delicately wrought lines into crystalline solids."—Publishers Weekly