Inhabiting Laura Solomon's The Hermit

The Rumpus has a review of Laura Solomon's new book, The Hermit (Ugly Duckling Presse 2011), with poet and prolific reviewer Gina Myers unabashedly titling it "Everything Tastes Better When It's Precious." Myers notes that "perhaps what is so surprising about Laura Solomon’s third collection of poems is that though it is titled The Hermit, it is full of life and connections, or at least attempted connections, with others...." Myers also gets that the real heartbreaker might be Solomon's love for language. She quotes Solomon's poem "French Sentences": “I used to like words but now I hate them because I love them without reciprocity which means with every day I love them more and more because of hate // to comfort myself I take a lover but unfortunately he has a name which is another word for a word so constantly reminds me of my unfortunate marriage // this happens all the time to people so there is a word for it, prison.”

After focusing on the motif that is the young American abroad ("The speaker is often at a remove from her environment, surrounded by languages that are not her native tongue, though she slips in and out of French and Italian with ease..."), Myers remarks on the New York School influence on The Hermit:

The lyric is the perfect form for exploration, and in her back and forth, repetitions, and contradictions, Solomon shows herself to be a master, expertly capturing what it is like to be human. “French Sentences” is a great example of this. The poem opens with an epigraph from Ted Berrigan asking, “Is there room in the room that you room in?” A New York School influence can be detected throughout the book, however is especially strong in this poem, with its conversational style and meandering sentences. In the poem, Solomon finds herself “thinking again after having decided not to.” There’s a natural ease as she moves from topic to topic, and the poem refuses to reach a conclusion—it can’t conclude. As Fanny Howe defines the lyric, it can only seek and ask questions and never settle or arrive, and this is precisely what is so human about it. Even though the poem expresses much melancholy, the reader is left with the knowledge that the speaker will continue to move ahead, and perhaps continuing is all that we can really hope for.

Read the full review here.