"The two distinctive sequences that form I WAS BLOWN BACK explore the elusive, even ungraspable, nature of memory, perception and personhood with moving immediacy, and with a modesty of tone that cloaks a striking acuteness." — Michael Palmer
San Diego, CA: Singing Horse Press (January 1, 2005)
“Norman Fischer is aware that even if ‘words are free of their intentions,’ it is difficult to free ourselves of our intentions for them and allow the poem to find its way. This is one of the many paradoxes regarding poetic speech (and poetic silence) that reverberate at the core of his work. The two distinctive sequences that form I WAS BLOWN BACK explore the elusive, even ungraspable, nature of memory, perception and personhood with moving immediacy, and with a modesty of tone that cloaks a striking acuteness.”
“Norman Fischer’s poems in I Was Blown Back make homilies as homogeny of the world (occurrence) in that occurrence is already ‘word’ only. As homogeny of occurrence the poems may be static, or random-like, may be unfinished edges: ‘The world is a vice / A work of art, perfectly dense / Even in its pressure.’ Created prior, not by us, world is ‘diorama world’ in which we are. Poems (as they are by us … by him) don’t recreate or explain, any such being terminal. Fischer’s words are part of the interwoven mesh by thought perceiving its separation, the same separation that created, or is, the diorama world? ‘The air talks to me fluttering words … Human mind’s not human nature — / looking out at landscape I hear the songs.’”