October for Idas

The surreal crosswalks of the city.Star Black's poetry, urgent and oddly concentrated, is written in that rare other language of a city we have just begun to visit. The pleasures of this skeptical poetry are like those of an incomprehensible but entrancing tour of the city. Her clusters define her -- he hazardous inflammable fathoms of a prismatic poetics. A late symbolist, she remains faithful to a child's perspective, but after all the book adds up to an adult masque and a self-focusing lens. Something precise is always happening here, but also musical and canny or, simply, wise. -- David ShapiroIn October for Idas Star Black encounters vocabulary as world, a world often treacherous in its shifting planes, and abruptly revealed abbyses, its theorems arcane as lame establishing occult lines between naiads and power brunch. Language here is swarming and continually metamorphising presence -- Too many photostats gag the oracle -- through which the poet navigates a course measured by what is displaced. The most unaccountable juxtapositions, of trance and gruel, telecast and musk, are drawn into quick and startling harmonies, and a book made in part through collage techniques achieves a remarkable unity of feeling and texture. -- Geoffrey O'BrienThe poems in October for Idas careen and twist as if shadowing the fast-paced flusters of urban life. The book's title derives from the Greek myth of the maiden Marpessa, who, when asked to chose between the immortal glories of Apollo and the human love of Idas, chose the later.