Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip enthralls Eye Weekly

Lucretius was a Roman poet and philosopher whose epic poem, 'On the Nature of Things,' postulated that soul and body were made of the same material. In Funkadelic's 'What is Soul?' poet and philosopher George Clinton riddled the following: 'What is Soul? … Soul is a ham hock in your cornflakes / What is soul? … Soul is the ring around your bathtub / What is soul? … Soul is a joint rolled in toilet paper / What is soul? … Soul is you.'

Though Lucretius and other names of antiquity appear throughout the searching, philosophical verse of Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip, Robertson's sensibility — an exuberant, saucy approach to the materiality of language and vice versa — is much more in step with Clinton than long-dead ascetics. She doesn't quite announce, 'Behold, I am Funkadelic, I am not of your world,' but the possessive title on the front of Robertson's book and its back cover slogan ('My fidelity is my own disaster' in 48-point type) is a statement of purpose and identity, however tricky, that is rare in contemporary poetry.

Given that the work begins with what I interpret as a break-up letter between writer and reader (note the double entendre, 'We're this pair or more which can't absorb one another in a meaning effect'), easy description of the whole is difficult. But then, forcing us away from easy reading is probably Robertson's goal. One line elsewhere suggests: 'She writes against those who know how to read.' Pointedly eschewing cover copy, bio, author-on-the-beach photo and other publishing boilerplate, this isn't so much a book as an object with text.

Of that text, you will chew your way through each line, but you're rewarded with a language of senses particular to Robertson: 'Our blood sucks from roots, the delicate / And ingenious bodies we call pastries / Or most intimate aspects of animals / Honey, sap and other lucky seepage.'

Robertson's strongest work here is 'Draft for a Voice Over For A Split Screen Video Loop,' a treatise on pronouns that swings with subtle harmonic shifts: 'She brings this vocabulary into her mouth to sex it. / The information of her fear is her most serious and fragile part. / Thus she arrives at the idea of the mistake. / The masterpiece of her mouth feels natural. / The masterpiece of her mouth feels natural.'

Though several pieces in the collection were originally written to accompany art installations, the writing survives the porting to book form, sans art, very well. In 'About 1836,' an erudite dog tells the narrator about boredom: 'At the edges of the villages of Europe / there is boredom. / The villages of Europe / don’t want your thinking. / They want / not a new world. / In these villages / one rereads the soiled timetables / of minor trains / and finds therein / Grace.'

There could be cross-relevancies between the above passage and the original artworks but I believe in Robertson's dog so much that I’m not too worried about what I do not know. The self-contained nature of Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip is just that good.