I’m still reading Zwicky. There are no words to describe how heartbreakingly beautiful her poetry is, but here is an excerpt from The Geology of Norway, just to give you an idea – a sense of her voice:

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The afternoon blue light in the fjord.

Did I tell you

I can understand the villagers?

Being, I have come to think,

is music; or perhaps

it’s silence. I cannot say.

Love, I’m pretty sure,

is light.

You know, it isn’t

what I came for, this bewilderment

by beauty. I came

to find a word, the perfect

syllable, to make it reach up,

grab meaning by the throat

and squeeze it till it spoke to me.

How else to anchor

memory? I wanted language

to hold me still, to be a rock,

I wanted to become a rock myself. I thought

if I could find, and say,

the perfect word, I’d nail

mind to world, and find

release.

The hand moving is the hand thinking:

what I didn’t know: even the continents

have no place but earth.

Jan Zwicky: The Geology of Norway

from Songs for Relinquishing the Earth (1998)

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Jan Zwicky is a Canadian poet, teacher, musician, essayist & philosopher (b 1955). Her dissertation examined a “theory of ineffability,” that is, strategies for discussing the unsayable in art and philosophy. Influenced by philosophers as Plato, Herakleitos, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Simone Weil, Zwicky has established a reputation as a thoughtful, lyrical writer and editor.