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Martine Bellen
Places People
Dare Not Enter


69 pages
ISBN 0-937013-40-4
1991
$8.00

 

Echoey music, sweet and provocative, is the lure in Martine Bellen's language maze, where word opens as though in search of a secret exit, or perhaps just deeper harmonies, deeper allure. Language's old formal pathways, the song says, are not enough to take us places people dare not enter.
--Robert Coover

Reading Martine Bellen's extended, linked poems I think of cave fish navigating by instinct, not dependant on light. I am also reminded of labyrinths, nebulae, webs, sacs -- Places People Dare Not Enter -- of amniotic margins of thought forming in fluid suspension.
--C.D. Wright

Martine Bellen's poems dissolve the world of ordinary convers- ation and etch out patterns that demand another kind of world, one in which Satan is satin -- but still Satan. And then it comes as something of a shock to find that it's in fact our ordinary world still, which she has somehow gotten from a new angle. A real achievement.
--Keith Waldrop

Martine Bellen supplies us with maps for Places People Dare Not Enter. The terrain is the inner life and the linguistic structures it calls forth: labyrinths with moveable parts, nets, webs. Her writing counterpoints the diaphanous and invisible with a dense surface. It is an original and impressive record of a woman writing herself as both voyeur/voyager.
--Elaine Equi

Martine Bellen is a poet of refreshing complexity. Her un- predictable disjunctions and conjunctions and her baroque mix of vivd images and meticulous abstractions make one uncertain whether these poems (in verse composed of prose segments) are precise narrations of the contingent or of dreams or of the former masquerading as the latter. They are full of surprises.
--Jackson Mac Low