NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

Screens, masks, language that conceals and reveals... the task of unmasking. ...With Anne Blonstein's WORKED ON SCREEN we are on a word hunt and a world hunt all at once.

Let's start with the words. Blonstein has an ongoing love affair with them. Look at these exhilarating creations, taken at random: enchancements, fleurtatiously, rawberries, exspellent, gasplillies, greycioulsy, nuttertongued.. I admit to a slight preference for the Anglo-Saxon compounds, they are thinner on the ground, alas, but for me they have more earth, more texture to them... it may feel easier to invent Latin ones, but if she can create zungfrau, I am sure she can stretch to greater Germanic inventions in English. (But am only being nitpictious.)

Then the collocations: reheated adjectives, noun garments, the earth's narratives, English ifs, Etruscan nouns, skin-shaded indulgences, melancholic alreadys

And now, a whole poem. Let's take Poem 21: (they are numbered 1 to 108).

	Cracks of 
	mauve pain
	ochre silence
	infolding the instruments of 
	neverthemore...

But we need to delve further. Each poem is constructed in accordance with a Q/K/Cabbalistic system of interpretation known as Notoriqon (from Latin Notarius, a form of shorthand), which is similar to anagrams. Re-read the poem looking just at the first letter of each word and you obtain COMPOSITION, the title of Klee's painting. And we may go back and look at cracks, infolding, instruments in a different light.

Still you may say, So what? Well, take poem 59.

	     Geologically enunciated by inner rocks
	   gold
	    sedimented legacies
	and napped debris
	                        she chances her abundant floods
	transyllabically.

And lastly, to the title and the composition of the volume. The poems were inspired by and the title provides a mirror to a Paul Klee exhibition that the author visited regularly over six month period in Basel in 2002. The title of the exhibition: Werk auf Papier...hence the original title of WORK ON SCREEN (as the poems were being written) and Worked on Screen for the final product. Paradoxically, the subject matter of the poems is not dependent upon the Klee exhibition. I don't feel a need to search for a catalogue of the exhibition. Each poem functions also quite independently of the sketches.

Anne Blonstein is above all a poet who inhabits and is inhabited by more than one language (one poem has three stanzas, one in English, one in French, one in German, each a reformulation of the others; it is interesting to see that French is the language most resistant to any syntactic deconstruction!). Like anyone who functions on a daily basis in more than one language, using more than one language in one's poems is never a wilful exclusion of a unilingual readership but rather the necessary and often desperate search of a person who feels encaged in any single linguistic system, which lops essential dimensions off his or her own being and in so doing reduces their capacity for expression. No doubt this multilingual background has also enabled Bronstein to embark more readily on the tremendous linguistic adventure with the English language which awaits the reader of WORKED ON SCREEN.