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“The Vortex of Being
She arrives at the nerve-terminals of experience before we have registered it. Language is experiencing her, not the other way round. She possesses the necessary imaginative fatalism that separates the very good poet from the utterly unique one. The metabolism created anew by her own etymological non-reason has the overwhelming effect of forcing us to climb free suddenly from the darkness of a literary grave. We find ourselves arriving too late, such are the rapid associations and proddings of her mind, we have no other choice but to accept her logic, accept it as our new poetical fate, and the violent and cataclysmic ruptures of her poems as the inevitable moving away from the piteous and weak contemporary idioms that we cannot help but wage a war against.”
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“It must be acknowledged that Blandine Longre is a French national writing in English. Perhaps this is why she can appear both concrete and mist together. Perhaps this is why her poetry comes up out of us, rather than dictates a world back to us. There is something both masterful and fresh in the way she approaches the dictates of the language, as if combining the two cultural traditions (one in her blood and one in her pen) can give us access to that special conversation, alluded to in the opening paragraphs of this review, that has been absent for so long. Longre acknowledges her influences in the first few pages of Clarities – Plath is there, Sexton is there, and Donne is there, smiling at her ladder climb, her deeper breath and her stronger swim.”
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“Blandine Longre invites us to share an intensity of seeing, comprehending, reading the other and beyond: responding to the judgment call and interpreting the momentous subtlety of the moment. She has constituted an art of the matter of seeing: seeing in a most intimate and shockingly dynamic way. The irreducible integrity of the image that Pound once envisaged is herein extant. Clarities is an astonishing debut. Blandine Longre has unleashed a new, vital, metaphysical animal upon an unsuspecting public. Be warned!”
