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  • A Sun within a Sun: The Power and Elegance of Poetry
  • Susan Blood
Lyu, Claire Chi-ah . A Sun within a Sun: The Power and Elegance of Poetry. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006. Pp. xii+222. ISBN 0-8229-4277-1

Claire Chi-ah Lyu's gracefully written defense of poetry lives up to the blurbs on the back of the dust jacket, so that it makes sense to quote from one of them: "Lyu's project ultimately – and here is the place that I find it to be truly daring – has to do with inventing a new way of reading: to retain the analytic rigor of the deconstructive tradition along with the possibility of an emotionally literary responsiveness, and to keep the two engaged in a fine equilibrium . . ." (Janet Beizer). Lyu has indeed invented her own mode of literary criticism, one that could be called yogic reading insofar is it occurs on the border between thought and feeling and conceives of poetry as a releasing from any number of addictive behaviors: drugs, moralism, Cartesian thinking etc. On some level, Lyu's work attests to the surprising compatibility between deconstruction and a new-age sensibility, both of which promise a release from binarism. In theoretical terms, she enables a case to be made that we are perhaps not living in a "post-deconstructive era," as Beizer calls it, or that deconstruction might have an unexpected face, one that isn't dismal. The tradition of reading nineteenth-century poetry as ironic or resistant is far from Lyu's sunny preoccupations.

More concretely, Lyu's book is organized around readings of Baudelaire and Mallarmé, and when critics like Gilles Deleuze or Italo Calvino appear it is as teachers of wisdom rather than as scholarly authorities. Baudelaire's Les Paradis artificiels: Opium et hachisch and Mallarmé's fashion writings lie at the core of Lyu's æsthetic meditations. Her opening chapter, "Surrender of Freedom and Surrender to Freedom: Hashish and Poetry," begins with an unconventional gesture: she decides to take at face value Baudelaire's denunciation of drugs in Les Paradis artificiels, and to see how this might resonate with his poetry and other writings to produce a portrait of the artist at odds with the one derived from texts like "Enivrez-vous." Baudelaire becomes the emblem of poetic as opposed to narcotic living, and Lyu experiments with the distinction to increasing effect throughout her book. In her third chapter she opposes the hookah-smoking allegory of Ennui in "Au lecteur" to the exhilarated poet-figure in "A une passante," reading them as narcotic and poetic encounters with death, respectively. Her fourth chapter deals with the obscenity trial of Les Fleurs du mal, and argues compellingly that Les Paradis artificiels constitutes a response to the trial and the narcotized judgment brought against Baudelaire's poetry, and poetry as such.

Lyu's discussion of Mallarmé's La Dernière Mode, "The 'Frivolous' Other and the 'Authentic' Self" contains meditations on time and space in fashion and poetry, and an exploration of Mallarmé's choice of "Miss Satin" for a fashion-writing pseudonym. Lyu underscores fashion's connection to exoticism (the importing and exporting of identities) as well as to radical poetic experimentation: "The meticulousness with which Mallarmé devoted himself to the layout and design of the fashion magazine led to his final experience/experiment with typography in the oddly designed poem 'Un coup de dés' twenty-three years later . . ." (71).

Outside these broad lines, Lyu engages questions of the relationship between science, myth, and poetry. While the analogies she suggests in "Quantum Elegance" between Mallarmé and a particle physicist may seem thin or underarticulated, her efforts [End Page 321] to practice an experimental mode of criticism with the rigor and openness of a genuine scientific experiment produce some impressive results. The beauty of her work is in the details, in the wide range of unexpected references, in the freshness of her approach to canonical texts like Baudelaire's "La Beauté" and "L'Hymne à la Beauté" which seem airy and light (rather than tedious and shopworn) after she touches them. Towards the end of the book she writes that: "Reading occurs...

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