Apperceptions of Reinterpretations (Calliope Nerve Media), poetry by Felino Soriano, Reviewed by Lynn Alexander.
Felino Soriano has this amazing ability to weave a multi-dimensional scene replete with hidden histories and surmised contexts from works of art. I first became familiar with these poems from the work published in Full of Crow Poetry, then set out to find and read more of his work. I soon made my way to his website and then to this “e-chapbook” at Calliope Nerve.
Soriano is quite simply a writer of beautiful things, he expresses the characteristics of beautiful things, things that he culls from art and his absorbing eye, phrases that will get to you as they got to me.
In one of my favorites, “after Maurice Denis’ Mother With A Child At The Window, he writes about the image of a woman and her baby:
“forming permanent nostalgia” “a blurred line teeming with aliveness”.
If you look at the image, then read the poem, you can see how he has interjected his own sense of the beauty of it, and it changes the way the image is experienced. It also changes the way the poem is read when you can connect to what he is describing and what has served as inspiration.
Another that I love- “After Ernesto Montenegro’s Journey Around The Room”
“Spiral dialectics do not exist in the absence/ of a second being. Much to praise,/ the missing other dictating otherness/pertinent among paralleled agitation.”
‘After Luis Bujalance’s Amarrado a mi Sombra (Tied To My Shadow):
a touch, tender, space
inexistent brand of tumult too
the brand of life whose knowledge
remains
hanging
amid the memory’s
intellectual
attire
Soriano uses spacing to guide your pace, to make you pause, perhaps to make you stop and consider again the work that he is writing about. His poems push you to want to look as closely as he looks, see them as he sees them.
The download is free, so it is accessible to anyone, you can read it and experience it for yourself. You can get it here.
