Merril D. Smith’s advance review of ‘A Thing for Nothingness’

With three weeks to go until the book’s release, I am delighted to share Merril D. Smith’s advance review of A Thing for Nothingness, by Pablo Saborío.

Pablo Saborío’s A Thing for Nothingness is a collection that explores the metaphysical and mystical, as it takes readers into the mystery of nothingness. Reading the poems is like being immersed in an abstract canvas, Hilma af Klint, for example, or sent flying through the cosmos grabbing particles of light or words. Saborío is a self-assured poet, willing to take risks with space and line size, form, and even font size. He is also a master of startling imagery, such as “weave experience into weird hairdos of light” (“Nihil”), and this one that made me laugh, “she said the real world was panting like an out of shape chapter” (“Surge & Stasis”).

The volume begins with “Dictum,” a prose poem that announces, “I can tell you where I’m going.” Within this poem are phrases, such as “a purification of vision” and “loud abstractions” that makeup the book’s section titles. Throughout the book, Saborío repeats words and concepts like breadcrumbs to mark the journey. For examples, stones and time appear in several poems, as in “Where is time a fact carved from illusion,” and “the minute you speak, the magic of the real/ breaks off the cosmology of stone to language” (“Schism”) and “Time is a heavy stone in the hands of time” (“Now & Then”). 

The poems in this volume take the reader on a voyage through space and time, or perhaps more accurately, between spaces and beyond time. A place where language may be forming with the stars. Or as Saborío writes, “Once nothingness seizes your name, your last earth will be song” (“An Enormous Bridge to Illumination”). This is a collection for people who enjoy surprising and unexpected language and contemporary poetry.

Thank you, Merril, for providing this wonderfully perceptive review! A Thing for Nothingness is available for pre-order from Waterstones.com (Paperback) and Amazon.com (Kindle). I will be posting further updates in the run-up to publication.

Ingrid