Little Ease
“In these poems, there’s what hovers around the ear and how that is or isn’t the self. They remind me of my upper and lower limits, and how song’s limits relate to what’s around. How to sound out domesticity, singularity, the nation? Each a freedom or a prison-house (‘little ease’ there), but the song skillfully binds them and releases them by ‘plant[ing] it round with//…sweet Lyric Song.’” —Eleni Sikelianos
“Aaron McCollough’s heartbreaking Little Ease is stunning in its ability to get at collective—yea, national as well—sins through its cries and meditations on a single soul’s struggles toward ‘nothing but holy, pure, and cleare’ (Herbert). The 4 x 4 cell in the Tower of London, Little Ease is of the self’s own making, from fear (‘. . .to work / at / deeds / for sake of deeds / [that] seek repose and rest. . .’), and the victimizer is the victim of her own sins, finding no ‘rest in restlessness.’ The poet takes his palette from the social and religious upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when the grip of a ‘personal God’ began to tighten. Aaron McCollough is a poet of prodigious powers, able to take the full of his poetic inheritance and to make essential poetry at the center of our own ferocious gyre.” —Susan Wheeler
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