BEFORE RECOLLECTION, its provocative title giving elbow to Wordsworth's definition of poetry, was the first book I bought by Ann Lauterbach in the wake of work I read in consecutive issues of Conjunctions. 

The oblique melancholy of Before Recollection, the lyrical energy of the poems, their borrowed landscapes and elusive weathers, their attentiveness to the "here" and "this" of felt experience, and their astounding lexicon- now lush and sensual, now philosophical and acute- made clear to me the necessary impulse of her work and the significant place it would have in my life.  I felt that Lauterbach's writing somehow maintained the form of her thought and, doing so, made real a time of constant attention.

I read backward, into her earlier book Many Times, But Then.  And then, in 1991, forward into Clamor where the characteristic pulse of her work, its diastolic and systolic beat, rapture rupture, rupture rapture, is most audible.  In Clamor, narrative is torn into cursory sketches.  Lauterbach snips all but the thinnest threads of story from her work and finds "surprise and loveliness there/ Where wild surprising fragrances at last delay our pursuit."  Without a target or conventional ending to pursue, the reader zeros in on tonal shifts, metrical patterns, trajectories of fragments, on such insistent figures of language as layer the title poem.  In Clamor, Lauterbach's intention is not to construct a summary statement that absorbs potential dialogue, but rather to make a latticework that can hold significations of both urgency and coherence.  As she writes in "Lakeview Diner," "We are kept by the indefinite, aroused."

Yet, throughout her books, we are allowed a curious intimacy, as though the poems were snagged in webs of a dream, traces of memory, in "Quotations of light."  The elasticity of her syntax and brightness of her rhetorical flourishes inflect some poems with modulating, dissonant tones.  In others, like "Prom in Toledo Night," each fragment contributes to a voice so exact and intentional that readers are propelled by the very certainty leading them on.  Her word stresses bring contour to a musical line whose intensity is reinforced through the use of space and suspense.  Then there is the humor- "The wind, well, you know, windylike"- the sexuality- "A moaning figure on a huge bed"- the sadness and fear at large in the poem "Blue Iris."

Lauterbach's poems indagate a piercing emotional register, the sexual gash and moral wound "in the ongoing," and with Form.  We see couplets and response, fragments pointing off into dashes.  Slash marks bifurcating meanings and isolating phonemes that mix like flammable chemicals to kindle new fires: "her here/ ere he/ Eerily...."

Her most recent and incendiary title, And For Example, combines technical virtuosity- syntactical shifts, a widely varying diction, collage, lists, and fragmentation- with an extreme pitch of emotion, desire at precipice, angst.  The book metaphorizes dehiscence- the blowing apart of relations- and connection- the possibilities of relationship- with a formal grace so gorgeous and radiantly intelligent that the poems- particularly the long title poem- read as plangent rythms of an impassioned consciousness linguistically and experientially inscibing itself.

Lauterbach's stylistic purity is never a deprivation of expression, but rather a mounting of concentration.  Her vision is not about transcendence, but proximity.

In And For Example, Lauterbach, employs linking verbs to make propositions which, like Wittgenstein's truth functions, examine the nature of facts in time.  Her lyricism is undercut by dashes which both sever and connect, thereby questioning relationship, and by caesurae that not only "display amnesia," as she writes in "For Example: Stepping Out," but create openings "thru which the musics/ might come."  These gaps in the text are matched in other places by folded texts, as when she writes:

They are waiting to be told to come in.  I said now.

I said now they are waiting to be told to come in.

If there is a sorrow lodged in the epistemology of many poems, it is buoyed by equal parts eros and by irrepressible inventiveness.  Their strict, formal beauties never bottle up the fundamental wetness of the poems.  And in each of her books, as she writes in And For Example, "it is raining faster."