An Oblique Voice, by Matthew Schultz

Poetry, chapbook, 48 pages, from Bottlecap Features. First, we detect a pattern. Then, we translate that pattern into words. In this collection of twenty-two poems, Matthew Schultz draws upon the images of Jean Dodal’s Les Tarots de Marseille (c. 1707) to attune his perception of place. For twenty-two consecutive days while sitting atop Observatory Hill on the campus of Vassar College in New York’s Hudson Valley, Schultz wrote a poem that ties together the images preserved on the cards and the images that played out in view of Sunset Lake and, further afield, the hills and mountains of the Hudson Highlands. This collection plays with the appearance of the oracular as a haunting of images that sabotage reality. For Schultz, the oracular utterance generates aesthetic experiences that attune our awareness to the forms that construct reality. Once we have become accustomed to looking at the Tarot de Marseille, we can see visual rhymes everywhere. When the oracle claims its space in daily l