The Fatalist

The Fatalist is a terrific instance of Hejinian's work in recent years: a lush re-purposing of sinuous, elegant syntactic constructions to hoover up just about anything that happens in the mind in time. Everything from childhood Victoriana to John Zorn ensembles get gathered up into the poem, which becomes a field of surprise and play in every sense: play of signifiers, mind at play, the play's the thing, play that funky music, you name it. Because her lines push clauses through time with the variety and complexity usually attributed to "fine" writing, the poems slip easily past the centurions of craft--there's no doubt among the doubting that this counts as poetry. But beneath the surface shine, The Fatalist in fact works as "a site of resistance to resolution" that refuses any logic (of mortality, of fate) that insists things have to end.