DaDaDa
Salt Publishing, 2003.
Perfect Bound (POD), 208 Pages. No price listed.

Well it’s very late here, but I’d like to begin to consider this book. Catherine Daly’s poems have the sweep and intellectual verve of Mina Loy on a good day. In fact, I checked out the back of DaDaDa to see if she’d listed Arthur Cravan as her significant other. She does real battle in these pages with her Catholic past, and I believe she finally slays the beast with her vorpel sword, or at least decidedly puts the pope in his place. In addition she rings the changes on such icons of pop culture as Coco Chanel, Mary Cassat, Georgia O’Keefe, and [write the name here]. There’s fragmentation, erasure, encoding, decoding, floating clouds of words, charts and Latin–a veritable tool box of the post-post modern. She even quotes Led Zepplin as a head note to a poem called “Ahs”. It’s all here, folks. To top it off, she has drop dead good looks as evidenced by the photo on the back. This is yet another characteristic she shares with Mina Loy, who was a Futurist, a Dadaist, a Vorticist, and lots of other ists besides being a Gibson Girl. That was not a male chauvanist grunt, but a mere statement of fact. I hope in a future posting to reprint at least one of the poems from DaDaDa, if I may.

In short, buy and read this book. More soon.

Now, finally, to bed! What a day and what an election!