Maggie O’Sullivan and
Palace of Reptiles
A Critical Portfolio
I’ve always experienced O’Sullivan’s poetry from the bottom up, amazed by the intensity with which the interlocking of word with word builds up into passages whose syntax might be deeply unconventional, but whose pace and movement is graspable in an instant by the eye moving across the page. That said, the time is now overdue for a top-down reading of O’Sullivan, one which recognises the deep awareness of history, anthropology and myth which is a central and structuring presence in her poetry.
Peter Manson, in The Paper 7
(full text available here)
It is just this flight, this controlled fission and fusion of language into a poetry that dances between the personal-magical and the mutually graspable, that makes Palace of Reptiles so enjoyable and exciting. . . . Startling, challenging, exhilarating: this is a book in which poetry fulfils its potential, moulding and stretching language to its breaking points.
James Wilkes, in Terrible Work
(full text available here)
O'Sullivan’s work forces recognition of points of intersection between bardic traditions and the defamiliarizing practices of an avant-garde. . . . O'Sullivan's poems embrace the oral, aural, visual, and sculptural qualities of language and include mangled and fractured words as well as dialect, slang, and archaisms abutting noncewords and loanwords. . . . It is hard to imagine a poetic practice more invested in the polyvalent, physical properties of language, or one for which paraphrase is a more futile task.
Keith Tuma, in Anthology of Twentieth-Century
British & Irish Poetry (OUP, 2001)
O’Sullivan’s writings have a truly inimitable agenda . . . which moves through language towards both musical and painterly arenas and the freedom with which this is achieved suggests an immense disenfranchisement of the ideological content of language in favour of its raw physique . . . [T]he movement of the text is given an acute physical agenda: intensively condensed and punctuated lines present obstacles to advancement; as they are lifted we are rushed back into the effluvia of a hand-made lexicon. This procedure articulates a widening and intensifying of analogous muscular activity: running, stumbling, breaking, stifling, releasing; all of which can also be felt through the presencing – in its inflections and gesturings – of a voice . . . [T]his is a poetry of breathing, of continuance along its sinuous sequentialism. Its libidinal quality of wilful postponement affords endurance, an economy of the last word . . .
Aaron Williamson, reviewing
In the House of the Shaman (Parataxis 6)
; more info about the site is available