Cellar, Anthony Etherin
Penteract Press, 2018
Penteract Press, 2018
Made up of short poems
originally posted to Twitter over the course of two years, Anthony Etherin’s
collection of constrained poetry Cellar is the result of a sustained,
dedicated, and above all exceedingly thoughtful writing practice. Published in
2018 by Etherin’s Penteract Press, whose declared focus is on “constrained,
formal, and experimental writing”, Cellar exemplifies this commitment by
being comprised entirely of anagrammatic (where every line contains exactly the
same letters as each other line) and palindromic (where, by letter, the poem is
the same read backwards or forwards) poetry. Despite the aura of stringent,
potentially harsh formality which such an approach may inspire, this collection
of poems produces the opposite effect – it is a wild book, an exercise in
euphony, a linguistic roller coaster.
The subject matter within Cellar
varies enormously, from the historical English Wars of the Roses to meditations
on exoplanets, forests, rivers, and the nature of poetry itself. This cornucopia
of disparate topics, united by their beauty and by the particular, regimented
forms of the work, produces a powerful feeling of “entire worlds seeming / to
merge in wilderness….” – a vast, generalist’s rumination on everything. It is
the kind of thing which one may think would be hindered by constrained writing,
but which in this case is profoundly enhanced by it. As such, whether the
explicit intent was there or not, Etherin has produced with Cellar an
eminently strong argument for the urgency and necessity of constrained writing
in a poetic world more or less dominated by free verse. It is an argument, and
a beautiful one, for the expansion of our poetic terrain – a noble endeavor,
and a wildly fun time all the while.
Ethan Vilu hails from Calgary, Alberta. Their poetry longsheet A Decision Re: Zurich was published by The Blasted Tree in March 2020. In
addition to editing for NōD Magazine and filling Station, Ethan is also a
fledgling bookseller and collector.