Sisyphus My Love (To Record a Dream in a Bathtub) is a multi-media series poem containing threads that wind, unravel and accumulate.  It combines prose poetry, lyric, myth, fake myth, journal reportage, a Poetry Blog kept on line, and the beginnings of novellas that do not arrive anywhere and do not return.  It contains memories of digital films and photographs taken on the Mediterranean seaboard in and around a long poem about trauma, love, death and desire --and the heroic myth of a modern Sisyphus through “his” point of view as he becomes a disembodied figure  after a journey to the Land of the Dead following a heart-attack. And it tells a heroine’s myth, that of Sisyphus’s unnamed “Wife.” It is she who continues the tale while her husband, that perennial trickster figure who defies the gods, dies and comes back.

            Part travelogue, part epic poem, Sisyphus My Love (along with “To Record a Dream in a Bathtub”) is also the record of an American Road Trip that begins in a Northeast garden but concludes along a Mediterranean shoreline -- from the beaches of Nice, France, to Pompeii (the “Villas” series) to the Greca-Magna sites around Sicily.  This road-book like others before it repeatedly asks the question:  What is a poem?  And what is a book?

Once there was a time, before this and before that, a time of metaphoric remembrances and repetitions, virtual rehearsals. “The rhythm of film like poetry” becomes the rhythm of poetry like film “to remain inside and outside at once.” Funny outrageous dark dreams are real, wherein a smaller point size of type determines infinitives. “Sisyphus died and came back that week,” back to the beaches of the Riviera, the old “New City,” where the radical “I” was an Orpheus who did not turn around but instead rhymes “bleak” and “chic.” Suddenly there are gorgeous enhanced images, photos not illustrative but rather making a concordance between text and image à new language of poetry, memoir, drama. Alert and alive, this encounter is like no other Sisyphus.

—Norma Cole

In Sisyphus My Love, Laura Hinton has realized a beautifully timed sequence of works running through the gates of dreams, faith and love. Hinton reminds us of both hidden geographies and sentiments; her writing is as organic and breathing as one senses not only the gravity of love and loss, but one can visualize the rolling hills of some forgotten and dignified places. In unpredictably bright and wide-eyed movements and will entrain you in echoes.

—Geoffrey Gatza

 

Review in Jacket of Sisyphus My Love by Laura Hinton

http://jacketmagazine.com/40/r-hinton-rb-hogue.shtml