{"id":5003,"date":"2015-08-04T14:16:21","date_gmt":"2015-08-04T13:16:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=5003"},"modified":"2016-01-23T14:47:26","modified_gmt":"2016-01-23T13:47:26","slug":"donna-stonecipher-model-city-shearsman-books-8-95-reviewed-by-ian-pople","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=5003","title":{"rendered":"Donna Stonecipher, Model City<\/em> (Shearsman Books) \u00a38.95"},"content":{"rendered":"

There has always been a hypnotic, meditative quality to Donna Stonecypher\u2019s writing.\u00a0 Her previous book, The Cosmopolitan, <\/i>was inspired by Joseph Cornell\u2019s boxes;\u00a0 its delicate self-contained prose poems held small moments up to the light and turned them so that their angles and lights gleamed and twinkled.<\/p>\n

Model City <\/i>is divided into 72 numbered sections, one to a page.\u00a0 Each section is further divided into four \u2018stanzas\u2019, each of roughly the same length of two and a half to three lines, and divided from each other by centred bullet points.\u00a0 Each section begins with the phrase \u2018It was like\u2026\u2019, but as part of the cover blurb notes, we never really know that the \u2018It\u2019 refers to!\u00a0 The \u2018It was like\u2026\u2019 is often followed by the gerund \u2018-ing\u2019 e.g., \u2018It was like studying\u2026\u2019, \u2018\u2026looking at\u2026\u2019, \u2018\u2026imagining\u2026\u2019, \u2018\u2026wondering\u2026\u2019 etc.\u00a0 The effect of these gerunds is to float action into the stanzas, as if quietly launching something onto the stream of consciousness.\u00a0 \u00a0Occasionally, the effect is rather twee as in \u2018It was like imagining strawberry and raspberry jam circulating neutrally among the theoretical inhabitants of the model city, jam for breakfast in the gardens of the well-to-do and at the epileptic farm.\u2019 \u2018Model City [23].<\/p>\n

But mostly, Stonecipher\u2019s meditations on life in the city are precise, deft and moving.\u00a0 And alongside the floating grammar, Stonecipher\u2019s imagination floats through the city and its inhabitants with precision and real care.\u00a0 And not just the humans, in Model City [4], she imagines meeting a fox in the city, \u2018- a real fox, not a taxidermied fox, not a fox logo, nor a foxy person that one might want to sleep with.\u2019 Then later, \u2018It was like watching the real, soft, cinnamon-colored fox, the only object moving in the landscape, moving silkily along the overgrown median, darting glances over at the people standing on the sidewalk, staring.\u2019\u00a0 Not only is there the precision of the colour, but that colour is held in focus within the landscape, then there\u2019s the nice sense of the silky movement of the animal in the \u2018overgrown median\u2019.\u00a0 \u2018Median\u2019 is the American English for \u2018central reservation\u2019, and one has to think that here, the American language has got it right \u2013 for this poem, anyway \u2013 as the shorter word fits with the location of the animal.\u00a0 There\u2019s also a neat play on the more mathematical sense of the median, as the animal is both clearly out of place, arousing the stares of the humans, but is, somehow, in the middle both physically but, somehow, in its sense of life and intensity.<\/p>\n

Stonecipher has been reading her Walter Benjamin and both the Arcades Project<\/i> and also Benjamin\u2019s sense of \u2018porous housing\u2019 are referenced in the book.\u00a0 \u2018Porous housing\u2019 was, for Benjamin, where it is possible to look, from the street, into the courtyards, arcades and stairwells of, for example, a Mediterranean city, such as Naples.\u00a0 In Stonecipher\u2019s version, \u2018It was like walking down a street walked down many times before in your own neighbourhood, and coming to a stop before a wide-open door that is usually never open.\u2019 Later, \u2018It was like walking through each glimpsed courtyard and glimpsing more courtyards, and walking through more and more glimpsed courtyards until you abruptly reach the last courtyard.\u2019 \u2018Model City [9].<\/p>\n

These quotations give a sample of Stonecipher\u2019s method in this book.\u00a0 She layers perception and reflection between the four stanzas of each section.\u00a0 And, as above, where this does not come off, there is a self-consciousness\u00a0 to the surrealism which is unfortunate and distracting.\u00a0 Elsewhere, she explores the imagined social mores of model cities, through the visions of not only Socialist utopianisms, and Le Corbusier, but also places such as Letchworth, the first British Garden City.\u00a0 Stonecipher has presented a profound meditation on the nature of the contemporary city, pondering not only how citizens might live and relate in such cities, but also how imagination itself evolves in these creations.
\n 
\nIan Pople<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There has always been a hypnotic, meditative quality to Donna Stonecypher\u2019s writing.\u00a0 Her previous book, The Cosmopolitan, was inspired by Joseph Cornell\u2019s boxes;\u00a0 its delicate self-contained prose poems held small moments up to the light and turned them so that their angles and lights gleamed and twinkled. Model City is divided into 72 numbered sections, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nDonna Stonecipher, Model City (Shearsman Books) \u00a38.95 - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=5003\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Donna Stonecipher, Model City (Shearsman Books) \u00a38.95 - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"There has always been a hypnotic, meditative quality to Donna Stonecypher\u2019s writing.\u00a0 Her previous book, The Cosmopolitan, was inspired by Joseph Cornell\u2019s boxes;\u00a0 its delicate self-contained prose poems held small moments up to the light and turned them so that their angles and lights gleamed and twinkled. 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