Just in time for your New Year’s Eve celebration for 2007, a little close-up magic from Eileen Tabios, who leaves the stage and circulates among the tables where the Muses lean on their elbows and stare dreamily into space. “Dredging For Atlantis” (Ootoliths, 2006), is a slim, perfect-bound volume of erasure and found poems, which she calls her “scumblings.” I was immediately struck in the first part of this book by the lovely fragments she dredges up from the “body” of Mina Loy and arranges in powerful stabiles:

ARS POETICA

I am climbing a distorted mountain

…………………………………….the summit

s
u
b
s
i
d
e
s into anticipation of
……………………………………..Repose

“which never comes”

Or this fractured, yet still-working pseudo-syllogism like a rusted Model-T engine that kicks into life in the middle of the Gobi desert:

CONSEQUENCE

A breakfast of rain

……………………oil-silk umbrella

“Count stars for me”

Or this one, worth the price of admission alone:

FUTURISM

The truants of heaven
possess a startling velocity

All of which reminds me of that lovely song from The Tempest:

“…nothing of [Her] that doth change,
but doth suffer a sea change
into something rich and strange…” where the Her, of course, is Mina Loy, and the agent of change is the delicate “scumbler” Tabios.

The second and third sections of the book–”Somehwhat of a Childhood” and “Athena’s Diptych,” respectively,– present longer scumblings, and these draw from a wide range of sources. All of which indicates to me that Eileen Tabios has been ranging through the Western Canon with a magpie’s eye and a most refined set of tools.

The final goal of Tabios’ scumblings is possessing the past in the present, though it is a past that falls into fragments even as it rises up from the murk. Still, these fragments have a glittering life and fascination of their own.

Highly recommended!