A Protocol for Touch
Copyright © 2000
by Constance Merritt
University of North Texas Press
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Constance Merritt is a poet to defeat categories, to oppose "the tyranny of names" with a
poetry
that sets its own terms of encounter, its "protocols of touch" — tender and austere,
formal
and intimate at once. Hers is a voice with many musics, sufficiently rich, nuanced and
various to
express, maintain poise and wrest meaning from the powerful cross-currents in which the
heart is
torn. I have seldom seen intelligence equal to such a scorching degree of intensity, or
mastery of
form so equal to passion's contradictory occasions. Merritt's prosodic range is prodigious
—
she moves in poetic forms as naturally as a body moves in its skin, even as her lines ring
with the
cadenced authority of a gifted and schooled ear. Here, in her words, the iambic ground bass
is in
its vital questioning mode: "The heart's insistent undersong: how live? // how live? How
live?"
This poetry serves no lesser necessity than to ask that. — Eleanor Wilner
Constance Merritt employs a stately blank verse to explore racism, romantic love,
health/disability, and the body politic. This first book includes accomplished sonnets,
sestinas,
and villanelles tuned to the contemporary ear and eye. ... and troubles our notions about
what we
"view" by complicating notions of sight and visibility. — Robin Becker
Constance Merritt has the unmistakable great range of a poet for whom the lyric is not a
way of
presenting the self but a way of entering the world. When we read her poems, we can hear
the
realms of interiority; the paradoxes of sight and sightlessness; a pained but clear
knowledge (in
both body and mind) of human failure and accomplishment, cruelty and love; a love of
play and
wit; the feminine; and a pondering of last things. — Reginald Gibbons
Merritt's debut collection, winner of the Vassar Miller Prize, opens
like a flower in time-lapse photography — each curving line a slow,
eloquent disclosure. The music of her words, their melody,
harmony, and rhythm, is complex and involving. The beauty of her
imagery, which gives equal weight to the senses of touch, taste,
smell, sound, and sight, is both as new and as familiar as dawn.
And her unexpected leaps of thought, feeling, and faith are exhilarating. Merritt expertly
parses loneliness and memories of torqued family alignments and elusive love, but she also
writes resonant and rebellious responses to scripture and other forms of authority. An
African American, Merritt is also blind, and questions of color and hierarchy come into
play often in her poems, which are powered by the tension between classical forms and
unconventional points of view. Merritt explores many states of being, both external and
internal, and gives voice to personae both timeless and contemporary in poetry that combines
the strength of steel and the suppleness of silk. — Booklist
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