Difficult Ornaments

Difficult Ornaments brilliantly reveals how the lush Floridian landscape inspired six twentieth-century American poets. Subtly and discerningly, Mlinko examines the peacock character of the state and of poetry alike, in order to clarify the often-overlooked power of poetic ornament. * David Caplan, Southern Methodist University *
This attractively personal meditation on poetry and place, by one of the most subtle and discerning readers of poetry around, is actually a treatise on style--to be specific, a celebration of the extravagant, 'proliferal,' peacock style that Stevens and poets like Bishop and Merrill cultivated in the coral soil of a half-real, half-imagined Florida. In the process they created an unlikely American tradition that Ange Mlinko has defined and introduced us to here. * Langdon Hammer, Yale University *
'The state with the prettiest name,' as Bishop dubbed Florida indelibly, is also a state of mind in which profusion and extravagance flourish, and it has found a proponent, midrashic and scholarly, in Ange Mlinko's commentary, equally ludic and intense. Like her poems, these essays are trellises for vines dense with blossoms, creating their own patterns by means of lightning transition, serendipity, resurrected etymologies, and other percipient or witty trouvailles--all rooted in rich, 'venereal soil,' in Stevens's term. The vines, the lines, the motifs of her poets interlace like rhymes in a mazy troubadour form, mazy and florabundant. At times one suspects the subject is not Floridian but American poetry itself. * Stephen Yenser, Author of The Consuming Myth: The Work of James Merrill (1987), Stone Fruit (2016), and Blue Guide (2006) *