The Rose Concordance

In the rose concor d ance , Angela Carr sets up the rules for a game and then breaks them. The poems trace a constellation of fountains, whose waters lap from an erotic medieval poem through contemporary art and film. Luxury rushes headlong into Felony, Love hears Irony in Ecstasy. Like fountains, these poems resist any one enduring shape or reading. For in Carr's voice, water is dappled, and wind catches the fountain and moves it sideways at night when no one is looking. In the gentle mist of words, complicity is vilified, abjection is interrogated and the precious is tenderly chided. Carr's first book, ropewalk, is an underground classic of highwire suspension, and her second, the rose concor d ance , is a fountain garden that invites the reader to tarry, and drink.