“Into the Same Sound Twice displays how language, like the world it witnesses, is something radiantly prismatic.” – Fiona Sampson
American poet Zakia Carpenter-Hall’s stunning debut Into the Same Sound Twiceis a place where ‘the ordinary rules of motion’ don’t always apply. What ensues are words, bodies and environments that thrum with new music. In language that is at once precise and tender, Carpenter-Hall leads us into rituals of care, ancestral memory, a rainbow that coruscates and various forms of rupture and repair.
Borders can become meaningfully blurred. In ‘Shakespeare Honours My Grandmother’, a play’s burial scene merges with a funeral taking place four-thousand miles away. The language of dramaturgy is then used to describe both. ‘Big Talk’ counters the unfathomable vastness of space with the sensuality of a kiss. The collection creates its own multi-sensory language and landscape.
A tour-de-force sequence, ‘The Earth-Eating Fire’, is a reflection on wildfires all over the world, from California to Australia. The poem considers how human beings impact the outside world and vice versa in a way that’s both hauntingly delicate and powerful. Captured in these poems – both intimate and vast – is the sense of how much we do not know, how much there still is to be achieved – but sometimes the body, rhythm and poetry itself can be a conduit
Reviews
“Important, groundbreaking work is happening here, therefore – ‘the cultural burn begins’ – and these beautiful poems are, in that sense, on fire…this slim pamphlet is, further, wonderfully expansive, containing not just the world but the cosmos beyond; it is finely, daringly, cleverly written; and, it is often surprising.”
~ Mab Jones, Buzz Mag
“Through this exploration, Carpenter-Hall invokes a feeling of the sublime… [and] presents readers with an individualised understanding of creation by connecting it to her own exceptional life […] Hence, Into the Same Sound Twice brings the reader that little bit closer to the universe upon the turn of each page.”
~ Holly Porter, Gwales
“This debut collection is expertly crafted, and spans huge themes. There is a deep connectedness between the poems which twist and loop through different realities […] I am left with a sense of multitudes; we are all connected by threads, past and present, everything is intermingled. These poems burst with treasures, and yield more each time they are read and savoured.”
Dr Khadija Rouf, The Friday Poem