Reviewed by David Applebaum
Paradise Loft
ISBN 978-1735441023
2022, Lightwood Press
$5.68, 90 pages, paper
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Paradise Loft by its own admission is “a collection that explores time” (p. viii). It becomes clear that Laurence Carr has his own way of looking at time. Time as after-image, not exactly the play of memory but somehow after the present, where “the mind’s eye reveals / and shakes a hundred truths / from doubt.” (“above the mast,” p. 14). Time as peerless and true. Time is when the dark “whispers things I know I know / but since have long forgot.” (“in the field” p. 56). Such a time has an enigmatic arrival, “with no warning / it’s sifting through your fingers / like sand on a cape cod beach.” (“Red Cap” p. 36). Out of the red cap, there is “all the time in the world / coming out of nowhere.” (ibid.) It seems involuntary, this encounter with time. There may be a practice that invites it: in “breath,” “breathe out / the past that coats the throat.” (p. 35).
There are stories from this impassable time. They express its unfinished character. There is the danger of losing oneself in it. In “Stephano,” the subject “in his lost hours / he hears the sirens’ nocturne” and “this life is no longer his.” (p. 57). The danger arises because “our present / is a flat, blank space” (“the card game” p. 62) without signs or signifiers, so that the poet, whose heart has been inflamed. turns to that pure past that is almost never past. There, one can discern “the nomad’s / timeless cries [that] pierce / the pinprick hole of heaven.” (“the comet approaches,” p. 18). Wandering in the empty space between times—the entre-temps—the poet transcribes cosmic events for the sake of humanity. Which then marks him—”you’re in our crosshairs.” (ibid.)
Who is? The passage in (and out of) time, it seems, is to glimpse the one who is unable to be revealed in past, present, or future. It’s the “you behind the moisture / on the glass looking out at me.” (“Lakeside,” p. 40). It is apparently the poet’s urge that awaits “the day when someone will come / and restore him back to the timeless path.” (“Harlequin,” p. 47). Whether by intention or “by the spin of the wheel” (ibid.), the poet will be returned to his destiny, wherein “do we learn / the learning.” (“in time, 6 a.m.,” p. 72). Then, following the clues—“their shavings left behind” (“sharpened pencils,” p. 6), we can reenter the dark waters of betweenness and rediscover “our confessions left unspoken.” (“pencils write a line of words,” p. 10).
Carr’s clear, concise expressions, his exploration of language that uncovers the heart of feeling make this collection well worth a deep read. He is a gifted storyteller and observer of the turns of the road that usually go by at blinding speed. Paradise Loft is a book of revelation.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 25, Issue 5.
David Appelbaum is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy of the State University of New York, New Paltz. He is author of several books including Everyday Spirits (SUNY Press), and most recently, Portuguese Sailor Boy and Collector of Lapsed Times (both Black Spring Press. London).
Laurence Carr is a writer of plays, fiction and poetry. His novel, Pancake Hollow Primer, A Hudson Valley Story, published by Codhill Press, won first prize at the 2012 Next Generation Indie Book Awards for First Novel (under 80,000 words). Carr is the anthology editor for Codhill Press (codhill.com): editor of Reflecting Pool: Poets and the Creative Process; co-editor of A Slant of Light: Contemporary Women Writers of the Hudson Valley (awarded five national and international prizes; see details under the link “Writing”), editor of Riverine: An Anthology of Hudson Valley Writers and the co-editor of WaterWrites: A Hudson River Anthology, all published by Codhill Press. His fiction and poetry has been published throughout the United States.
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