Poetry review – FOXGLOVEWISE: Colin Pink admires the technical expertise behind Ange Mlinko’s imaginative and evocative poems
Foxglovewise
Ange Mlinko
Faber, 2025
ISBN 978-0-571-39386-2
£12.99
Lately, major UK publishers have started to publish important US poets’ new collections as they come out. Last year Penguin published Peter Gizzi’s Fierce Elegies, which went on the win the T.S. Eliot Prize, and this year Faber have published Ange Mlinko’s latest collection Foxglovewise.
Mlinko is a well respected poet, critic and former poetry editor of The Nation magazine. Foxglovewise is her seventh collection and ranges widely over many topics, including foreign travel, her home state of Florida and intimations of mortality. The final topic is treated in the final section, which concludes with the marvellous poem “The Cemetery of Pseudonyms” where the nameplates of the deceased ‘have the same / effect as an iconostasis’ and ‘Where it’s your word against – your dust’.
Mlinko has the distinction of being one of those contemporary poets (one thinks also of Marilyn Hacker and Mimi Khalvati) who write, with great skill, formal verse that employs regular stanzas and rhyme. At a time when much current poetry reads, disappointingly, as merely chopped up prose and displays little sense of a distinctively poetic use of language it’s a pleasure to turn to work that uses a highly refined poetic technique; work where a sonnet really is a sonnet rather than just 14 lines of free verse claiming the name of a technically demanding format when none of those formal demands have been met.
Mlinko uses rhyme throughout the book but in a very subtle way so that, unless one pays attention to the structure of the stanzas, one might not notice they do in fact rhyme. This is mostly achieved by spacing the rhymes far apart within the poems. A frequent technique is for the first line in the first stanza to rhyme with the first line in the second stanza, the second line in the first with the second line in the second and so on, as in the book’s opening poem “Tarpon Springs, Epiphany”:
Maria Callas came to our banal climate, age five,
wearing her first pair of glasses, so that perhaps
the fizz of palms was the first thing to come into focus.
In time she might have seen the crucifix dive
at Epiphany, when rain like a jeweller taps
gingerly into the crystal of a water crocus.
The artist Paul Klee described drawing as taking a line for a walk and one suspects that a lot of Mlinko’s imagery emerges from taking rhymes for a walk. Much of her poetry also has a playful quality one associates with Klee. Mlinko uses rhyme not just as an embellishment but as a kind of creative motor for constructing the poem. As she stated in an interview: ‘…rhyme is an engine, an impersonal self-driving mechanism deep in the language, that I could learn to manage and adapt to my own ends.’ Mlinko uses the constraints of working within formal structures as a way of generating more intensely imaginative responses to the poem’s theme.
In the same interview Mlinko referred to the common source of the word text and textile (texere is Latin to weave and the source for both words) and she thinks of texts as being woven out of a communal body of knowledge and shared experiences. Mlinko’s poems consist of intricately woven words and she uses judicious repetition of phrases to bind together the disparate components of her verses. For instance, in “Elegy and Bourbon”, a poem set in the somewhat dismal setting of an airport terminal bar, the phrase ‘we live on a thin crust’ is repeated with slight variations throughout most of the poem’s 11 sestets, binding together its fragile ambience like a thread running through a cloth; for example, the opening stanzas:
We live on a thin crust. I can hear
the Kentucky Derby on the wide-screen
perched on its aerie
over the bar in terminal E. I can hear,
that is, the crowd-roar, the unseen
announcer’s commentary,
but I can’t hear the hooves. We live
on such a thin crust the horses
could break through it.
I am three generations, give
or take, off the farm; history’s forces
tear you by the root,
and so on until the final stanza’s sad reflections:
Such a thin shell we tread. Like an egg.
They pursue me to the gate, the silent hooves
from a bar called ‘The Explorer’,
where I drink before my last leg.
I worry – so transient are my loves –
living on air, my words are poorer.
Mlinko fashions her poems from densely patterned words, both allusive and elusive, in sequences of observations, reflections and memories. The sense of the poem, its multiple connections, established through the intricate resonance of certain words, ‘crust’, ‘gate’, ‘hooves’, does not lie on the surface of the poem but this means the poetry rewards frequent re-reading and subsequent reflection.
Mlinko lives in Florida and there is a sequence of poems evoking the tropical ambience of that state and its links with figures such as Ernest Hemingway. For instance, “Mermaids and Mangroves in Key West” is set against the background of Hemingway’s house in Key West (now a museum) and alludes to the numerous polydactyl cats (many of which have six toes on each paw) and the very costly swimming pool that so annoyed Hemingway when his wife had it installed in his absence.
After all, wasn’t the ‘last red cent’
spent on the pool set in cement
to consummate the marital argument
just a pretty penny? The pool
in the banana grove’s a jewel,
but we’re set already in a mar azul.
Luxury, danger and deceit seem to lurk within the lush lines of this poem:
The green flag of ‘Low Hazard’
was flying where we swam,
but I felt the pull of the Gulf Stream,
warm, swift and not too, too far
from the horizon’s flat-line cardiogram –
there’s hazard wherever there’s a dream.
There are so many allusions in the poems in Foxglovewise that I sometimes felt some end notes to explain the more arcane references would be helpful. For instance one line adapts a phrase from Rilke’s Duino Elegies and another quotes the opening statement from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. But at a purely textual level these poems are deeply rewarding, in terms of their innovative and imaginative employment of language, with the textual and imagistic resonances that run through them, that one can simply sit back and admire their intricate artifice without worrying too much about what it all means.
Mar 24 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – Ange Mlinko
Poetry review – FOXGLOVEWISE: Colin Pink admires the technical expertise behind Ange Mlinko’s imaginative and evocative poems
Lately, major UK publishers have started to publish important US poets’ new collections as they come out. Last year Penguin published Peter Gizzi’s Fierce Elegies, which went on the win the T.S. Eliot Prize, and this year Faber have published Ange Mlinko’s latest collection Foxglovewise.
Mlinko is a well respected poet, critic and former poetry editor of The Nation magazine. Foxglovewise is her seventh collection and ranges widely over many topics, including foreign travel, her home state of Florida and intimations of mortality. The final topic is treated in the final section, which concludes with the marvellous poem “The Cemetery of Pseudonyms” where the nameplates of the deceased ‘have the same / effect as an iconostasis’ and ‘Where it’s your word against – your dust’.
Mlinko has the distinction of being one of those contemporary poets (one thinks also of Marilyn Hacker and Mimi Khalvati) who write, with great skill, formal verse that employs regular stanzas and rhyme. At a time when much current poetry reads, disappointingly, as merely chopped up prose and displays little sense of a distinctively poetic use of language it’s a pleasure to turn to work that uses a highly refined poetic technique; work where a sonnet really is a sonnet rather than just 14 lines of free verse claiming the name of a technically demanding format when none of those formal demands have been met.
Mlinko uses rhyme throughout the book but in a very subtle way so that, unless one pays attention to the structure of the stanzas, one might not notice they do in fact rhyme. This is mostly achieved by spacing the rhymes far apart within the poems. A frequent technique is for the first line in the first stanza to rhyme with the first line in the second stanza, the second line in the first with the second line in the second and so on, as in the book’s opening poem “Tarpon Springs, Epiphany”:
The artist Paul Klee described drawing as taking a line for a walk and one suspects that a lot of Mlinko’s imagery emerges from taking rhymes for a walk. Much of her poetry also has a playful quality one associates with Klee. Mlinko uses rhyme not just as an embellishment but as a kind of creative motor for constructing the poem. As she stated in an interview: ‘…rhyme is an engine, an impersonal self-driving mechanism deep in the language, that I could learn to manage and adapt to my own ends.’ Mlinko uses the constraints of working within formal structures as a way of generating more intensely imaginative responses to the poem’s theme.
In the same interview Mlinko referred to the common source of the word text and textile (texere is Latin to weave and the source for both words) and she thinks of texts as being woven out of a communal body of knowledge and shared experiences. Mlinko’s poems consist of intricately woven words and she uses judicious repetition of phrases to bind together the disparate components of her verses. For instance, in “Elegy and Bourbon”, a poem set in the somewhat dismal setting of an airport terminal bar, the phrase ‘we live on a thin crust’ is repeated with slight variations throughout most of the poem’s 11 sestets, binding together its fragile ambience like a thread running through a cloth; for example, the opening stanzas:
We live on a thin crust. I can hear the Kentucky Derby on the wide-screen perched on its aerie over the bar in terminal E. I can hear, that is, the crowd-roar, the unseen announcer’s commentary, but I can’t hear the hooves. We live on such a thin crust the horses could break through it. I am three generations, give or take, off the farm; history’s forces tear you by the root,and so on until the final stanza’s sad reflections:
Such a thin shell we tread. Like an egg. They pursue me to the gate, the silent hooves from a bar called ‘The Explorer’, where I drink before my last leg. I worry – so transient are my loves – living on air, my words are poorer.Mlinko fashions her poems from densely patterned words, both allusive and elusive, in sequences of observations, reflections and memories. The sense of the poem, its multiple connections, established through the intricate resonance of certain words, ‘crust’, ‘gate’, ‘hooves’, does not lie on the surface of the poem but this means the poetry rewards frequent re-reading and subsequent reflection.
Mlinko lives in Florida and there is a sequence of poems evoking the tropical ambience of that state and its links with figures such as Ernest Hemingway. For instance, “Mermaids and Mangroves in Key West” is set against the background of Hemingway’s house in Key West (now a museum) and alludes to the numerous polydactyl cats (many of which have six toes on each paw) and the very costly swimming pool that so annoyed Hemingway when his wife had it installed in his absence.
Luxury, danger and deceit seem to lurk within the lush lines of this poem:
There are so many allusions in the poems in Foxglovewise that I sometimes felt some end notes to explain the more arcane references would be helpful. For instance one line adapts a phrase from Rilke’s Duino Elegies and another quotes the opening statement from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. But at a purely textual level these poems are deeply rewarding, in terms of their innovative and imaginative employment of language, with the textual and imagistic resonances that run through them, that one can simply sit back and admire their intricate artifice without worrying too much about what it all means.