Élan Vital

Author: Simona Blat

Publisher: Beautiful Days Press (2024)

In Simona Blat’s chapbook Élan Vital, slant syllogisms fall like cosmic rays over blackcurrant and dill, rockets and toxic meat, Goethe and Darwin, showing us that a thought is not different from a garden, in both its creativity and its enigma. Part polemic, part ode to the natural and unnatural world, Blat’s poems borrow Henri Bergson’s notion of a “vital impetus” in considering the miraculous possibilities of the creative impulse in all its forms, in the light of a poisoned earth. In the end, the poems paradoxically manage to express an inexpressible, interstellar unity, “the type of light that all things run down.”