Astoria
2006 University of Pittsburg Press
"Why did I enjoy this book so much? It
must be its utter sincerity. Morling's dreamy amazement at the world's
weird plenty never feels affected or calculated. . . . It's a rare and
refreshing delight to encounter such lovely ingenuousness."
- NYRB
"Malena Morling's Astoria is truly a
wondrous book. Her poems possess a concreteness and images that become a
vivid transparency. The poems are meditations that belong to the real
world without leaving it. People and places make bridges to each other.
The reader is turned to him-or-her-self. Every time I have reread Astoria,
I feel I am experiencing the poems for almost the first time. The poems
are constant enthusiasms, at work with intuitions from the heart and
the mind and the world."
- Michael Burkard
"There is something exquisite in
Morling's genuine pondering. In 'Astoria,' she moves through the city
and the imagination with great speed and yet a cautious and watchful
eye. Her keen observations make her work fresh and striking."
- Review Revue
"Her poems read like invitations to meditate on the fragility and richness of our lives. Our way of looking at the world gains in freshness and lucidity. Unexpected connections are created between the abstract and the concrete, the life of the deceased and the death of the living, faded wallpaper and parchment; cars and thoughts parade in unison. The beauty of the world is not bargained for, it is delivered exclusively through increased attention to detail.
Unique beings reverberate in the smallest fragment of the world. Things and words deserve to be experienced: this collection invites us to welcome any particle of reality as a breach of meaning. Beings and things resonate in potential and incessant transformations (bending Irises are seen as purple contortionists, 56). Malena Mörling’s poetry facilitates a Williamsian contact with the fully experienced Real, an opportunity to enter “the yellow head of a tulip” (37).
After the first stage of “cognitive dissonance” (69, Karin De Weille, “The world comes to light”) that these associations provoke, the reader finds a way out in an unprecedented understanding of death as an opening, of stories triggered by objects. Our awareness of the invisible, emotions and the simple pleasure of being are gaining strength. The clarity of Malena Mörling’s writing leads the reader to embrace what is immaterial (9, “Envol”). We can see an echo of the iridescent poems from Barbara Guest, which reveal transcendence in immanence. This poetry helps to better live the world by adorning the ordinary with reflections and new effects."
-Claudia Desblaches
Lecturer in American Poetry
University of Rennes 2, France
Ocean Avenue
1999 New Issues Press
“Like a modern-day Whitman, the poet loiters at her ease, in her case,
among the crowds of Grand Central Station ‘a little ecstatic/from
looking up at the constellations / in the green and gold ceiling.’
Listening ‘to the skinny violinist play Paganini’ she stands still,
letting the music touch her and feels ‘the whole station inside’ her awareness. Thus it is also a book of enormous calm; indeed, I cannot
think of another collection of contemporary poetry more conscious of our
need for the violence of continual change and more at peace in the
center of that violence. . .This is poetry whose aim is no less than to
recall us to what Wallace Stevens regarded as the greatest gift of
creation: to live in a physical universe.”
—Philip Levine
—Philip Levine
“Mörling is deeply aware of the moment of ‘passing through’ and it informs her poetry. Ocean Avenue is subtle, lovely, and original.”
—Gerald Stern
—Gerald Stern
—Michael Burkard