Reviewed by:

• Forms of Poetic Attention by Lucy Alford
• Zachary Finch

On the cover of this fascinating book is the image of what the book flap calls a "canary resuscitator." An odd birdcage made of glass and metal, this actual contraption, the size of a small lantern, was once carried underground by English miners; whenever the canary stowed inside showed signs of carbon monoxide poisoning, a miner could close the glass door and then open a valve connected to a tiny oxygen tank in order to restore the bird back to health. The resuscitator's image prefaces Alford's exploration of poetic attention in a provocative way, without ever being explicitly brought up by the author. Given the archaic correspondence between birdsong and poetry, we can readily imagine how this device might signify some external apparatus useful for reviving an ailing genre. Yet as Alford's expansive book makes clear, poetry is far from endangered and doesn't need criticism's interventions. Why then feature the resuscitator on the cover? Beneath the book's investigations may be the subtle suggestion that literary criticism itself requires reviving, could stand a little more oxygen.

Nowhere does Alford make such broad, antagonistic claims about the limits of criticism, yet the sweep of the book itself—its cross-cultural scope, its inclusive, transhistorical archive, its privileging of close reading—affirms an alternative version of what literary study might look like in an economy that values specialization, and within an academic climate that can often feel dominated by what Alford calls the "routine overtheorization" of historicist criticism in particular (107). Instead, this book takes on the timeless aesthetic ground of attention, a fundamental medium "as old and as central to poetry as language itself," which gets variously "infected" by conditions including "sociopolitical context, poetic convention, prevailing modes of reading, and the attention cultures surrounding both the act of writing and the act of reading" (7). Moving between poets as various as Sappho and Paul Celan, the sixth-century Sufi poet Rabi'a al-Basri and Audre Lorde, the highly personal, inevitably subjective act of selecting and reading poems is Alford's primary investigative interest, and her book crafts a language to describe the "bottom-up, phenomenological process" by which the formal object of the poem both represents and generates "the very shape and texture of inner life" (5, 270).

Poetic attention, as Alford defines it, is a latent precondition for reading akin to consciousness, the raw material upon which a poem acts in its work [End Page 123] of attuning readers to any number of states of being, to phenomenological Stimmung, to temporally inflected moods. In categorizing how this process operates, Alford proposes four modes of "transitive attention," in which poems are oriented around a particular object (real, desired, remembered, or imagined), and four modes of "intransitive attention," when the poem orchestrates attentional stances independent of a single focal object (5–6). Alford's framework is not just the result of a taxonomist, with pretensions to totality, but of a curator, whose speculative groupings and classifications are themselves a kind of art. The book's first part, "Attending to Objects," isolates five "key coordinates" (interest, intentionality, selectivity, spatiotemporal remove, and apprehension) that combine variously to engender the four fundamental affective registers of transitive attention—contemplation, desire, recollection, and imagination—which head the subsequent chapters (28). The book's second part, "Objectless Awareness," invents a different set of coordinates to describe how poems "without a central figure or 'content'" engender the genres of experience that comprise the final four chapters (151): vigilance, resignation, idleness, and boredom.

Wallace Stevens factors in most explicitly when Alford examines poems "directed to a single focal object, in which the central action and motivation is contemplation itself" (51). In Chapter II, entitled "Contemplation: Attention's Reach," we receive an extended reading of "Study of Two Pears" that emphasizes "the failure of language to capture the fullness of perception—of vision, in particular—without resorting to metaphor and analogy" (65). Although Stevensians will not learn anything new from this reading of the dialectic between painterly abstraction and realism in...

审核人：

• 露西·奥尔福德（Lucy Alford）的诗意注意力形式
• 扎卡里·芬奇（Zachary Finch）

在这本引人入胜的书的封面上是该书的翻盖所谓的“金丝雀复苏器”的图像。这种实际的装置，大小只有一个小灯笼，是由玻璃和金属制成的奇怪的鸟笼，曾经被英国的矿工们带到地下。每当存放在其中的金丝雀出现一氧化碳中毒的迹象时，矿工就可以关闭玻璃门，然后打开与微型氧气罐相连的阀门，以使家禽恢复健康。复苏者的形象以挑衅的方式作为奥尔福德对诗意注意力的探索的序幕，而作者并未明确提出。考虑到鸟鸣声和诗歌之间的古老对应关系，我们可以轻松地想象到这种设备如何表示某些外部设备，可用于恢复患病的体裁。然而，正如奥尔福德（Alford）的著作中明确指出的那样，诗歌远非濒临灭绝，不需要批评的干预。为什么要在盖子上盖上复苏器？在这本书的调查之下，可能有一个微妙的暗示，即文学批评本身需要复兴，可以承受更多的氧气。

奥尔福德在任何地方都没有对批评的局限性做出如此广泛的，对立的主张，但是这本书本身的横扫范围（跨文化范围，包容性的跨历史档案，对近距离阅读的特权）肯定了文学研究的另一种形式。看起来就像在重视专业化的经济中，并且在学术氛围中，常常被阿尔福德称为特别是历史主义批评的“例行过度理论化”控制（107）。取而代之的是，本书采用了永恒的美学基础，即“一种古老的语言，与语言本身一样，是诗歌的中心”的基本媒介，受到各种条件的“感染”，这些条件包括“社会政治背景，诗意的习俗，普遍的阅读方式，

正如Alford所定义的那样，诗意注意力是阅读类似于意识的潜在先决条件，这是一首诗在其作品中产生作用的原材料[End Page 123]，使读者处于各种状态，对现象学的免疫性很强。，以适应暂时的情绪变化。在对这一过程的运行方式进行分类时，Alford提出了四种“转移注意力”模式，其中诗歌围绕着一个特定的对象（真实，期望，记住或想象的）取向，以及四种“非转移注意力”模式，当这首诗进行编排时独立于单个焦点对象的注意姿态（5-6）。Alford的框架不仅是分类学家以总体为前提的结果，而且是策展人的结果，策展人的投机性分组和分类本身就是一门艺术。该书的第一部分“参加对象”分离了五个“关键坐标”（兴趣，意图，选择性，时空删除，和忧虑）通过各种方式结合起来，形成了转移注意力的四个基本情感记录-沉思，欲望，回忆和想象力-它们构成了后续章节（28）。该书的第二部分“无目标意识”发明了一组不同的坐标，以描述诗歌“没有中心人物或'内容'”是如何产生体验体裁的，这些体裁包括最后的四章（151）：警惕，辞职，闲散和无聊。

华莱士·史蒂文斯（Wallace Stevens）最明确地考虑了奥尔福德在检查诗歌时“直接针对一个焦点对象，其中的主要作用和动机是沉思本身”的原因（51）。在标题为“沉思：注意力的到达”的第二章中，我们获得了对“两个梨子的研究”的扩展阅读，其中强调“语言无法捕捉到感知（尤其是视觉）的充实性，而没有诉诸于隐喻和类比。 ”（65）。尽管史蒂文斯主义者不会从这种对绘画抽象和现实主义之间的辩证法的学习中学到任何新东西。