Shore Ordered Ocean

Shore Ordered Ocean

“These are wonderful poems. Dora Malech knows just about everything there is to know about the risky music that lives in language. But she also knows about Truth and Beauty. She’s far too wise to try and make these last two rhyme, but she constantly tempts them into conversation.” – Bill Manhire

“If you’d wondered where the dappled things had gone, how the tisket and tasket ended up, what the fickle, freckled, couple-colored pieces of life were up to, look no further. Dora Malech has woven them into her exuberant debut. And she’s stuck in too the x-rays of Zeus and the horns of Moses. Shore Ordered Ocean is by turns witty and wonderstruck, fragile and fierce. Best of all, it announces an extraordinary talent to be watched and cherished.” – J. D. McClatchy

“Inquiring, irreverent, reverent, enraptured, Dora Malech is that rare thing, the magician technician, and she has written a book in which a sudden segue in poetry takes place – from Hopkins to the present. The result is as breathtaking as a dove release. She knows every word in the world is a book, that every center sought and found is continually thrown off, that the muscular is fragile and vice-versa, yet none of her old soul knowledge is ponderous, predictable, or dull, for she remains in love with that essential playfulness which is the innocence of art. Here is Malech on the birth of a child: ‘… unfold all / those origami limbs to test / the inevitable debutante bawl.’ This book is an astonishing debut, one that makes me feel our original, lost language has found its way home.” – Mary Ruefle

Reviews of Shore Ordered Ocean

Indiana Review, 32:2 (Winter, 2010)
"Dora Malech’s … Shore Ordered Ocean is a feast for the ears, tongue and imagination …. – Alessandra Simmons

PN Review, 196 (November-December 2010)
"Dora Malech is a remarkably individual and assured poet, both funny and engaging … She has a remarkably keen eye for the outer world. Her effortlessly fresh descriptions, such as ‘The young snails resemble pearl barley’, even find a new epithet for that old hack, ‘the chubby moon’. Taut couplets suit her talent for summary, surprise and wisecracking … I am full of admiration for Malech’s range … Her collection, which concludes ‘let us at least attempt / our impossibly / tiny lives’, leaves me with a sense of possibilities for an exciting poet, who, unusually, could take off in various directions. I look forward to communications from her poetic after-life." – Alison Brackenbury

Tarpaulin Sky
"Dora Malech is a poetic contradiction of the best sort: a hyper-productive perfectionist. There’s a surplus of brilliant poems in Malech’s ninety-one-page debut, Shore Ordered Ocean, a book that showcases a rare talent." – Greg Lawless

To read the whole of this review, please click link: Full Review of Shore Ordered Ocean

Poetry London,No 66, Summer 2010
"Malech’s great talent is to loosen our boundaries with the sounds of words. She reaches further back than Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose work must be an influence, to Metaphysical poets such as John Donne and even to Shakespeare. Here is part of ‘Dreaming in New Zealand’:

And since this is my comedy
of ears, in one and in the other’s
fate’s to trip again, I’ll claim:
the body is both bread and breed,
as words well said are planted seed,
and grow so where we tread is treed,
where each line read remains the reed
on which the note is played when pressed
to lips, mouth, self-ordained as priest,
weds wed to we’d and weed and so
with word grown one forever as even
the dead remain in deed, wound round
and round in these wet sheets of wind.

Complex syntax folds clause on clause to build up a rhetoric of public performance … Malech subsumes everyday idiom wittily inside a poet’s voice that relishes patterned phrasing:

Tread threads tract
To contract, acts
As line and signer. (‘Ubi Sunt’)

There is political commentary, too, in this collection. Malech presents some scenes of direct and highly visualized violence, as in ‘Liar’:

… ‘But by now the heat has melted what’s inside his arms and the blows are breaking the burnt skin that’s holding him together.’

This quotation describes a filmed fire, violence contained in a safe space. Tradition, or what we have learned, is a source of unease in her poems. By here delivering sadistic description through the voices of educationalists: ‘This is where we learn how to approach disparate conflagrations’, and by her many other and varied technical resources, this poet undoes the security of our television-led inner world. – Claire Crowther

New Letters, Spring 2010
"[The poems in Dora Malech’s … Shore Ordered Ocean are stark, lyrical, and intense … Reading this book is like a good, strange dream from which you never want to wake." – Danielle Sellers

Acumen,67, May 2010
"[S]triking in its power of physical evocation, the lanhguage often being used with a Hopkins like instensity and a fascinated (and fascinating) ear for the sounds of words, for the echoic patterning of consonants and vowels that makes for some remarkable effects … This is a talent well worth watching." – Glyn Pursglove

MAKE Literary Productions, MFP
"Even fire could not snap the spectrum up as you do, proclaims Marianne Moore in “To A Chameleon.” At the risk of overt labeling or select application of another writer’s words, it must be said that Dora Malech’s first collection has an expansiveness that inspires such comparisons or at least demands a phrase that summarizes the whole. One gets the impression of a huge space, delivered iota by iota to the reader with discipline and control. The language of these poems does not miss a beat; it is literally a “heat-seeking scope” that detects the playful, the romantic, the unbearable, the metaphysical. Here, we have a master of craft who honors the metrical order of a poem, the structure of every line, and above all the sonic effect of words in their order. Nevertheless, Malech’s idiom is capricious and malleable. Phonemes and morphemes bring themselves to light. At a poem’s end, its intricacy is so evident that the reader could easily return to the beginning and assess the poem in a different way: admire its tiny building blocks, its internal echoes and visual patterning … In Shore Ordered Ocean, Malech has examined and stirred up language to such a level that it is exciting to imagine how her work will progress. Her other collections will be written in its wake – not in the sense of a backwash or aftermath, but in response to her own unleashing of a powerful force." – Jane Lewty

On the Seawall: A Literary Website by Rone Slate
“When I really like something, all of the praise coming out of my keyboard sounds flat. Fake. Like this: “Dora Malech is the real thing. Ever since I heard her read two poems aloud in 2004, I’ve been waiting for a book from her.”

Oh dear, I really mean that. But how can you hear it? You cringe. Or at best the cliché washes over you, like a ripple in a wave pool. So I tried the online anagram engine. Dora Malech’s Shore Ordered Ocean is

A Credo Redone She Or.
A Code Reorder Shone.
A Corrode Nosed Here.

Of the 58,524 anagrams of the collection’s title, ready-made in eight seconds, here’s what I like about the three above: Each captures how Malech’s poems alter – redo, reorder, corrode – the world. Patterns are heaped upon broken patterns. Here Name Your is the title one bears. Oh go disfigure, another poem says.

When the poems don’t know what to say, they sing – until they hit upon something, or end.

Her diction is clipped. Her ear is impeccably playful. Oomph inhabits her lines. Her rhythms! These poems are laced with some kind of metrical chemical. So you just march on and suddenly the book is done.

Stop though. Don’t equate playfulness with innocence or obliviousness. The poems are full of breaking-here-means-broken-elsewhere news – local and international.

Your mother yells at you as you’re stepping off the curb, Look both ways before you cross! You’ve heard it so many times before that you don’t hear it anymore. So you don’t look. You get hit by a car. And then Dora Malech comes along and says Cross both ways before you look, and it makes sense – you can understand English again – and of course, you’re not safe – you’ve already been in a horrible car accident and you know there’s no safe passage to be had – but at least now you have an anthem. Or a creed. And A Creed Doors Hereon." – Darcie Dennigan

To view Ron Slate’s website, please click link: Twenty-One Poets Recommend New and Recent Books of Poetry