This latest by Klara du Plessis examines a collaborative event and, in doing so, endlessly multiplies it – so the event isn’t dead after all. The poetic post-mortem proceeds in three sections, each establishing a different aural relationship to a central spoken event – a series of meetings the poet organized for the launch of a previous collection. 

Post-Mortem of the Event
Klara du Plessis

Palimpsest Press
$21.95
paper
120pp
9781990293771

The last section and the single poem it contains have the same title as the book, in a mirrored game that doesn’t stop with the name-nesting: borrowing images from the famous Rembrandt painting of an anatomy lesson, the poet dissects, not bodies, but sounds:

The event

opened, undocumented archive over the table,

displayed | splayed | played

anatomically laid out to rest | resist

Saving the first for last, the “LIVE STREAM” section opens with the “Dead Air” sonnet crown – theoretical and organic, civic and wild, surreptitious and brazen, it’s a daredevil of meshing opposites. In a moment when the sonnet is often reclaimed but seldom for good reasons, this is “a whole parliament of sonnets” speaking up for themselves.mRb