Raw String by George Korolog

 

Raw String, a new collection of poems by George Korolog, begins with an implicit call to the reader to join the poet on a journey of sorts: Let us agree that lamp shades / should not be stretched, / that light should not be / bent or filtered. The us being the poet, the reader, the voice in the works, the poems themselves, the you that is both personal and universal. A seeking for understanding, manifested in these poems, is one of the essentials of good writing, and Korolog makes this the backbone of his book.

 

Lets be frank. One day, you may be the person
called upon
to illuminate,
to define, to make the tough interpretations,
the big calls,
to answer the difficult questions..

 

moving the reader closer to a contemplative encounter with discovery. Maybe we connect with this element in the works because we are, at least in part, searching for ourselves among the pages.

One of the strengths in Raw String is the poets phrasings, poem to poem, that are at ease in a clear settled voice. The writing is direct, and the syntax quite musical, revealing poems that are sure of themselves:

 

The language and sounds in the poems create a wonderful flood of imagery: the birch, / stripped naked, / is bathed in its own / nude reckoning, / sallow against the sky, / ghostly bare, / gangly thin and gunmetal grey sky / slashed with deep cuts / like rips in a coal vein that has / been there forever, waiting to / be discovered.

 

The word-music, more necessary than narrative, displays a haunting world that readers will long to enter. The closing line of Going Home, wandering willingly into the deep, is a perfect descriptive of the readers journey. We do enter willingly this collection, and are enlarged by it.

 

In this collection, George Korolog writes a patchwork of tones and images, with no missteps, opening mysterious and wonderful worlds with each read as echoed in Soul Stone: We craft our paths … carve our stories … bow and stand in awe. Indeed. Raw String is strong work, not to be missed, by a gifted writer.

–Sam Rasnake, Editor, Blue Fifth Review

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]

 

 

This was a relationship, this was a man, this was a woman, this is an old woman who’s become a walnut table, this is how the sea mirrors the chaos of the universe. This is transformation, in almost a single bound, from the physical to the metaphysical. This is how a woman’s orgasm speaks to God. Sex, death, chaos, the cosmos; this is the territory mapped out in Raw String, a collection of 22 poems, by George Korolog.

 

The speaker in “Erosion as the Ground of Being” writes to us from Mircea Eliade’s axis mundi; time out of time, and the mythical center of the world. In this poem, it’s located at the intersection of sand and water, a fixed point, from where he observes “all things gather at oceans/edge to merge.” Life is eternally in flux but he can balance himself “on the dunes and watch great cities/returning home on the changing tide.” This calls to mind the long journey home of Odysseus, and the shifting tides of sand and sea, but also the great joy of the eternal return. Great cities do rise and fall, and from this vantage point, he sees the impermanence of it. He also sees the chaos and the sublimity of life.

 

And because life is constantly in flux, chaos abounds, but so does love, and these poems chart that ambiguous and sometimes terrifying space between the life we live, the life we left behind, and the life we dream about in our dreams. Consider the speaker in “Height of Love,” who’s both terrified and exhilarated at the prospect of oblivion— he might lose his life “if I love you less.” Or the speaker who picks up a stripper in “From the West, Eastly and Southly,” gets a speeding ticket, but still gets the girl. “Winter Birch” is a portrait of a man trapped in the vegetable world, stripped of his defenses, at the edge, yet still capable of transcendence.

 

In “A Brief Sentence from the Woman who Played with Herself (and God”), a schoolboy speaks to his lover, “You had me from the moment/you dared to enlighten me.” She reveals that masturbation, for her, is a spiritual practice. That it is a conversation with God. That she wants to “merge with God through orgasm.” Here is another echo of Eliade, the necessary conjunction of the sacred and the profane. Orgasm and masturbation as a numinous experience. He imagines her, “one finger at a time/asking for forgiveness/and demanding satisfaction.” He learns that “Talking with God was a slow and deliberate process with its own lessons.” Lessons of transformation, lessons of impermanence, of flux, of divinity.

 

Sometimes the voice is incantatory, almost Whitmanesque. “Soul Stone” operates at the nexus of the physical and the metaphysical, but there is a rolling cadence that reveals Korolog’s pure and passionate love of language: “We craft our paths with sediment, stand within the edifice/clamber and crawl inside the caved and pitted shell.” The speaker asks us to remember the alluvial clay “that lured us down from the trees to mate with stone.” Again, echoes of the axis mundi and time out of time, as the speaker exhorts us to “carve our stories” on stone, so that we will never forget them, even if they are painful and terrible.

 

Raw String is a collection of highly intellectualized poetry, filled with astounding imagery, and provocative metaphors, that speaks to us from the present, admonishes us to never forget the past, reminds us the future is in flux, and that the raw string of the universe ties it all together.

–Lillian Ann Slugocki has created a body of work on women and sexuality for print and for the stage;, Off-Broadway, including, The Erotica Project, co-authored with Erin Cressida Wilson, at The Public Theater, National Public Radio, American Theatre Magazine, Seal Press, Cleis Press, Heinemann Press, Salon.com, and more recently on Her Kind.com, Jezebel.com, and Beatrice.com. Her latest book, The Blue Hours, was published by Newtown Press, 2012. “Streetcar Deconstructed,” will be published in a Wreckage of Reason 2: Back to the Drawing Board, Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2014. Her work has been reviewed, among others, in The New York Times, The London Sunday Times, The Village Voice, and Art in America.

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]

 

George Korolog‘s aptly titled Raw String, coaxes his readers to grasp, tug hard and to untie, until each poem lays quietly unlaced. Straightforward and timeless, he speaks with an earthy pioneer elegance, hearkening to another era. His intimate style conveys like a personal, handwritten letter, with passages that beg to be read aloud, over and over. Every piece in this compelling second collection of poetry is surprisingly unique in both content and form, yet with the same deeply spiritual voice. Intelligent, and often erotic, be prepared for a fresh journey with every read.

–Tess Kincaid, author of two books of poetry, “Patina,” and “Unpressed.” Author of the blog, “Life at Willow Manor.”

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]