The Mirrormaker - by Brian Laidlaw (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

In The Mirrormaker, songwriter and poet Brian Laidlaw melds myths ancient and contemporary among the raspberries, wolves, and taconite mines of Minnesota's Iron Range.

A companion volume to Laidlaw's 2015 project, The Stuntman, this collection fuses the stories of two fabled couples: the mythical Narcissus and Echo, and Bob Dylan and Echo Star Helstrom, subject of the song "Girl from the North Country." But where The Stuntman focused on Narcissus, The Mirrormaker takes its primary inspiration from Echo, drawing on ecocritical readings of American history and interrogating the masculine logic of resource extraction.

In these poems, Laidlaw explores themes of history and celebrity, love and longing, myth and meaning, in a landscape both ravaged and redemptive. He pits romantic obsession against self-obsession--"The first time I saw the moon / I thought it was my idea"--and asks whether a meaningful distinction can ever be drawn between the two. These themes are explored further in a companion song suite, written by Laidlaw and recorded with a longtime collaborator from the Iron Range, that accompanies this book via download.

Sharp, searching, and ecstatically musical, The Mirrormaker is a genre-expanding exploration of boom and bust--in mining economies and in young love.

Review Quotes

"In the phrasing, language, and sound of Brian Laidlaw's poetry one hears what is by now the absorption of a century of country western music, from its Appalachian and Celtic folk roots to those closer to us: Kitty Wells, the Carter Family, and so on. Postmodernism comes in and sort of blows the lines all over the page, as Laidlaw is a poet, a singer, and a musician of our time. He brews a discordancy into the harmony. His masterful Mirrormaker takes as part of its subject Echo, the strangely prescient name of Bob Dylan's high school sweetheart (and also the mythological Echo, doomed to repeat only what Narcissus said as he stared into his own reflection). Laidlaw is a futuristic country poet-singer in the other side of the century's mirror, where consumption, celebritifying, and commodification rule as the earth rots from the inside out. Calling 'what is killing what' and 'the sick of the fields, ' Laidlaw is singing the trails and singeing the words as he hears 'an alternate gospel.' When he writes, 'the replica me heartbreaking the replica you, ' one wonders at the possibilities of love, of sincerity in simulacra. Brian Laidlaw is living proof that the bard is still with us."--Gillian Conoley

"The brilliant lyrical mind of Brian Laidlaw engages the way echo works among words, between words and the world. Sound returns from the world's surfaces to the singer's ears to give evidence, to accuse, or to console. This is a poet who knows the complications of the human voice, and of the ventriloquial voices assigned by poetry to the things of the world: 'they dance a dance / called formerness / / Echo is them, ' he writes of sparrows. Like echo, what returns from the listener is a symmetry: 'you hope for some applause / to reveal what show you're in.' The applause this book deserves is loud, but the opposite of deafening."--Bin Ramke

Praise for The Stuntman

"Reveals Laidlaw's unique talent in deadpan, witty poems that flash with plangent images and macabre moments."--Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Bold and unapologetic . . . Laidlaw proves himself a fearless, acrobatic poet in The Stuntman."--Coal Hill Review

"'The earth broke open cause we broke it open.' Laidlaw knows, as Bruce Chatwin wrote, that an unsung land is a dead land. The Stuntman resurrects sonic fragments of folk knowhow by threading them back through the thrashing heart of American lyric. He wrangles Bob Dylan's idiot wind into the hothouse breath of each line's conspiracy: 'I am part of the collective / idiocy, the anthill a commons and a summons.' In this gorgeous debut, he takes what's common and small and stronger than it knows and bids it sing: 'I have been staring at the sun long enough I'm ready to be the sun.'"--Chris Martin

"The Stuntman is a dazzling first book: an all-night thrill revival, a jamboree of ecstatic yawps. Laidlaw is a poet of tremendous lyric gifts and emotive modulation, full of jubilance and unwavering freshness. The associative technique in each of these missives corkscrews and swerves through the broken world with dispatches of yearning, growing these big-hearted and fearless experiments of structure and voice into a gorgeously raw-throated orchestra."--Alex Lemon

"These poems punch a hole right through the wall separating me from magic, leaping back and forth as if the wall were a fire--between the quotidian and the ecstatic, between a commons and a summons, breaking down antagonymic barriers so the sun shines through."--Eleni Sikelianos