Review of Elana Wolff’s “Swoon”
by Keith Garebian Swoon Elana WolffGuernica Editions (2020) ISBN: 9781771835077 Elana Wolff’s sixth poetry collection uses epigraphs that connote various meanings of “swoon:” The Living Torah’s example of Rebecca’s falling off a camel in a shock of elation at seeing Isaac; Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s slow swoon of life creeping back; Robert Walser’s example of a violent delight; and Franz Kafka’s “swooning counts as believing.” Wolff’s abstract cover painting detail (from her own “Elemental”) is a visual swoon of its own in its strong curves that portend something powerful and mood-driven. Building on her compulsion of perception in her fifth collection, Everything Reminds You of Something Else, and its spare, introspective, elliptical, and heart-probing lyrics, Swoon puts the reader “at the crux of wonderment/& tech sophistication,” with poems that are stunningly meditative, ekphrastic, and intense while being musical even in their intrinsic tensions. The opening poem, “The Months of Flooding,” is a template in its technical devices and strategies, using strong sonic emphases by way of alliteration (“mantic movie music”), internal rhyme (“more rain fell than could drain”), …