Elanor Earl Crockett is a poet and performance poet from Austin whose taped productions show an amazing liveliness and variety of voices. This compilation includes work from a period of several years and would serve as an excellent introduction to her work. On the tape, the poems are performed against a variety of noise an/or music backgrounds, although the sound and voice are often deliberately at the same level, so that neither is dominant. It is fortunate that the tape is accompanied by a booklet of the texts, which stand alone very strongly as poems on the printed page. The poems take a great variety of approaches, from first-person narration to word and/or dialect play, to anaphoric or conceptual structures, to an almost Language-like allusiveness in a piece called "Phrases," a collaboration with "SW":
which to choose
aerobic animals will see light
pocket manufacturers
trapped in the gravel mica glinting
from this vantage the trajectory
silence tears the evening
until at night and drive right into the ocean
The productions values of this work are simple (reduced typescript, etc.) but the content is strong, polished, and unique. --John M. Bennett
This review originally appeared in TapRoot Reviews #5,
Contact the editor, luigi-bob drake, at Burning Press
Copyright Burning Press 1994, 1996.