A Review of Laurie Sheck’s Black Series (Alfred A. Knopf, 2001 ) – By Vikki C.

I’ve long admired Laurie Sheck for her ability to elevate the everyday narrative of struggle and human inquiry into luminous, intellectual reveries. Her poetics are not only beautiful, but rooted deeply in the sublime scoring of precise images braided elegantly into a fluent, philosophical vernacular. One whose orchestral effect transcends the bounds of knowledge, ever searching new ways of contemplating our tenor on Earth.

The long-lined sequences in Black Series leverage a sensuous blend of human and non-human voicings, both cinematic and resonant. Sheck distils time, giving alchemy and tension to the quiet of every encounter. I was mesmerised by the animated framing of non-human objects such as mannequins in “The Store Windows Glitter”: 

“Look how the store windows glitter. Irradiated / mirrors, strenuous slashings over the false alarms / of the mannequins’ smooth faces.

[..] 

Then there’s quiet again. Then flashing sirens — / the mannequins putting on colour as red lights twist past their windows / giving them red wings, red wings growing out of each shoulder, rippling / 

and lifting / over the envious/ silver, prisoned glass” [3-4]. 

Her ascribing of textures to air and blurring of thresholds too makes each scene an alternate world viewed through a defamiliarized lens: 

“Then a dusk like this, a subversion of surfaces, / a vague expectancy of absence. Blurrings. Wings. I watch the edges break and flee; they are Ophelias.

Soft town that settles on this land, town of inconclusiveness / encryption, I touch your gateless air, your scaffoldless / upholding.” [5] 

These poems interrogate and project the subconscious onto geometries both real and imagined where myth and modernity collide to reclaim the parts of our lives eroded by rote. This is a journey of lyric and spirit pushing delicately against the borders we have grown too accustomed to. In this, Sheck invokes a metaphysical glance we cannot turn away from. These poems invite a stunning spectrum of meaning, and with each reading, a radiance and music both startling and sacred. 

Black Series is published by Alfree A. Knopf and is available on Amazon.