The Ambrosiacs by Les Wicks
Island Press, 2009
In Les Wicks' The Ambrosiacs visual and tonal senses, shown through a series of relentless escapes and endscapes, create a striking depiction of the poet's perceptions and observations. The fundamental basis of Wicks' collection, and the manner in which the reader is encouraged to approach them, is as an elegy: a series of memories and dedications aiming for the preservation of the instant, even if the instants are acknowledged as fleeting. The elegiac is not only the thematic directive, but plays out an effect of the visual, referenced from the first glance at the obscured palm trees packed densely on the book's cover. The ambiguity produced by the image on the cover references a loss to see clearly, and elides the demarcations between the trees and the sere, as the temporal space between them vanishes into the depths.
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