Mirrors for Princes

MIRRORS FOR PRINCES gathers poems that have, until now, only appeared in magazines, as limited-edition chapbooks, or as commissions for artists—not quite “B-sides and rarities,” but “other writings,” which represent a more outward-looking, varied, collaborative approach to poetry, and a mode that owes little to the processes and conceptual forms that characterize Riviere’s previous collections.

These poems playfully and provocatively take their cue from a mediaeval genre of handbooks for minor rulers (“mirrors for princes”), with Riviere offering “advice” for the young poet or artist, on a range of topics such as masculinity, the fine arts, poetry prizes, identity politics, academia, long distance relationships, technology, drugs, internships, international cuisine, fan mail, interview etiquette, festivals, depression, sports, mindfulness, monarchy, sexting, divorce, and death.

“The hew of design is practically sensorial in the manifold work of Mirror for Princes, Sam Riviere cropping poems around ‘a little bolt that takes the plot apart,’ the drop shadow of experience like ‘some out of reach happiness / the gleam of an eyeball beyond the sunglasses,’ prêt-à-porter insofar as language is ‘restoring itself at new boundaries around me.’ I love Riviere’s exquisite de-rendering of the world, ‘reverting in certain lights to stacks of images / Where every visitor is burned away / Like loners from a fantasy that no longer requires them…’. Riviere reinvents us as the specters inside our own clothes, our vistas, our mirrors, ‘Full of… / narrative possibility, completely fantasised… / folding apart / Or – it was hard to tell from that angle – closing up…’.”

—Ted Dodson, author of An Orange