Poetry Book Reviews
- Samantha Barrow, Jelly
- Jennifer Bartlett, Derivative of the Moving Image
- Stephen Berg, New & Selected Poems
- Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God
- Joel Chace, Cleaning the Mirror: Selected And New Poems
- Billy Collins, Sailing Around the Room
- Jean Day, Enthusiasm: odes & otium
- James Dickey, The Whole Motion: Collected Poems, 1945-1992
- Jill Alexander Essbaum, Harlot
- Leonard Gontarek, Deja Vu Diner
- Thom Gunn, The Man With Night Sweats
- June Jordan, Kissing God Goodbye
- Jennifer L. Knox, Drunk by Noon
- Teresa Leo, The Halo Rule
- Reb Livingston, Your Ten Favorite Words
- Jackson Mac Low, Thing of Beauty
- Laurie Pollack, PeaceWalk
- Liam Rector, The Executive Director of the Fallen World
- Martha Ronk, Vertigo
- Ron Silliman, The Age of Huts (compleat)
- James Tate, return to the city of white donkeys
- Jean Valentine, Little Boat
- Jack Walters, Saigon & other poems
- Hannah Weiner, Hannah Weiner's Open House
- Meir Wieseltier, The Flower of Anarchy
monkey/tiger alliance ltd.
2005
My ancestor Judge Word would surely be appalled by the material in this
very short book, but I would like to think that at some deep unspoken
level he would admit a grudging admiration for a strangely kindred
spirit of a poet forging a new truth across the wide open spaces of America.
As for me, I bear no grudge, and am compelled to stand in silent awe
before my slow rhythmic then raggedly faster clapping followed by deafening shouts of "Testify!" Yeah. Freaking incredible. Word indeed.
University of New Mexico Press
2007
ISBN: 978-0-8263-4133-4
Normally in the absence of a bookmark I will turn down the corner of the page,
but for this book, even a bookmark seems like an imposition.
It is not the beauty of the book itself,
though there is something remarkably pristine about its manufacture,
or that the words are spectacularly elegant.
I think it is that the book is the manifestation of poems rooted in
and completely aware of every day, ordinary physical reality,
sitting at a specific outdoor cafe, on particular library steps,
walking the edge of that lake so that the implied can all the more by contrast fly.
It both contains and represents the art of an artist
living in the limits of the physical and the unlimits of the soul,
grappling with the corporeal lines that divide the universal spirit into individuals,
the painful fuzzy boundaries of where each of us begins and ends.
I sit on the 125 typing this review on the tiny Blackberry keyboard,
in deeply respectful reverence.
Copper Canyon Press
1992
ISBN: 1-55659-043-1
Something must have happened off screen between pages 121 and 122, or perhaps the visit to "the shrink" on page 120 caused a delayed breakthrough, because a book that had previously presented itself as watered-down James Dickey (the same obsessions with place, family, violence, death, weather and the recurring characters of sun and moon, but without any of the joyful exuberance or linguistic flair, and with no obvious trace of the author - the most personal poems being those written in the first person as someone else) suddenly made itself Real and persisted enjoyably as such until page 197 and the poem about the poet going to a Halloween party as an effeminate cross-dressing Hitler in what may have been intended as self-deprecation/anti-Hitler but which struck me in its use of image, language (one violent but hardly isolated slur in particular) and simile (which are, after all, tools of a poet, and not to be dismissed in a poem as incidental) as both anti-gay and denigrating women who socialize without underwear, leaving me with the highly unusual thought that while this really could be high art social commentary with deeper irony that I’m completely missing (in which case I’m sorry, but even if it is, it runs the risk of being turtles all the way down) perhaps a little less real emotion would have been more than adequate, and
while the text poems that followed weren't bad and the run-on-text poems were technically interesting, by then I'd just stopped caring.
New Directions Publishing Corp.
1995
ISBN: 978-0-8112-1302-8
This book is wildly uneven. The four page Introduction seemed much longer (can’t the poetry speak for itself? Does it really need this much explanation?). The first poem, The Glass Essay is one of the most incredible, richly layered, highly personal pieces of writing I’ve ever read in any genre. The Truth About God is a series of smaller poems, at worst good and interesting, at best astounding. Even having read the introduction I could not make any sense or find much art in the next two sections: TV Men, also a series of smaller poems, and The Fall of Rome: A Traveller’s Guide. The Book of Isaiah is weird and wonderful, intoxicating in its imagery, makes sense, doesn’t make sense, creates its own sense. And then finally The Gender of Sound which is really more essay than poetry, and as identity in general, and gender identity in particular are personal issues for me, both fascinating and riveting cultural anthropological analysis. But her assessment near the end of Playboy as an agent of ancient cultural oppression misses the subversive power of chaos bottled for male consumption, and the complexity of moving a male-dominated culture beyond repression and self-control into Universal Consciousness.
BlazeVox
2007
ISBN: 978-1-934289-58-7
BlazeVox proclaims / poetry
books come in many forms / Last night's mare waiting for
***
themselves a publisher of weird / poetry books
come
in many forms / her at a different train station delayed
***
little / poetry books come
in
many forms / delayed and then there ignoring boarding a
****
books and I cannot / poetry books come in
many
forms / helicopter previously unnoticed parked
***
argue, / poetry books come in many
forms, / inside the station leaving me shouting,
***
disparate threads conspiring to push me back in to
whirred blades of desperate sleep.
Random House
2001
ISBN: 0-375-75519-5
It's formulaic story telling with a twist (metaphor becomes reality, reality becomes metaphor, the most abstract concepts are anthropomorphized to humorous conclusion, the poet shifts perspective and/or person at the end, the ambiguities clearly marked as to be completely unambiguous) but so very pleasant, and it makes me smile.
Adventures In Poetry
2006
ISBN: 0-9761612-3-0
I'd like to buy a context please? Beautifully composed words leap effortlessly from the tongue. It's definitely a poetry book, as opposed to a book of poetry; I love how in Romantic Fragments the titles of the individual poems both start the poem and finish the one before, or at least appear to. But I don't fundamentally get it. Which may be what she's alluding to in the opening "The mania for explanation..." or maybe not. The source notes at the back are mostly to other art, so perhaps the point is art for art's sake, though others do not seem to share my difficulty of understanding; it may make perfect sense to you and even if it doesn't, you will have had the pleasure of reading it to yourself.
Wesleyan University Press
1994
ISBN: 0-8195-1218-4
And yet it works, intoxicatedly arranged and later accented words meaning precisely something else jaunted at the encircled subject like Dr. Yadav's chalk marks until the image, a half recovered memory of some stranger's trauma, is almost with you and you realize too late that the poem has already risen from the deck of the page, the falling gunner carefully adjusting you with violent clarity in his sights.
No Tell Books
2007
ISBN: 978-0-6151-6131-0
She dares speak truth and I who have known several like and wondered at
many more feel closer for the reading. Beauty out of pain (a phrase here and there
perhaps a little too forced to be clever and at times unintentionally repetitious for
a poet who has seduced English to her whims)
and I was sorry when it ended feeling self-referentially used and abandoned and
having enjoyed almost every second of our explicit spiritual experience.
Autumn Press House
2006
ISBN: 1-932870-07-5
Early evening geese speak without emotion of ethereal
concrete fragments spun together half awake, my
mother, the banks of the Schuylkill after a flood,
this book. Fugue state overtakes me as I read,
carries me in its cool embrace - nothing is completely
here but I cannot quite nuance what is missing just
around the bend of reality, nor do I
matter,
surrounded by the flowing broken lines and branches.The Man With Night Sweats
Thom Gunn
The Noonday Press
1992
ISBN: 0-374-52381-9
I finished this book in one morning commute, the first few poems read on the first bus annoying me with their rigid rhyming such that I kept looking at the back cover hoping that the glowing reviewers quoted there had actually read the same poetry. But by the third vehicle of the morning, the Norristown Trolley, I found myself too easily, painfully, dreadfully relating the rich dark Agnes Irwin girls making non-uniform use of orthodox plaid in the interest of new social conventions with 1980's San Francisco and realized how a beautifully understated communication of something new and alive and lost in the later poems had worked their way into my head.
Anchor Books
1997
ISBN: 0-385-49032-1
Wow. A little much angry here and there for my taste, the angry still
entertaining and not to my mind misdirected
(Operation Rescue, war mongers, supremacists, Clarence Thomas,
not that I claim any authority over the
legitimacy of anyone else's anger
even when I am agreeing with them) just a little less personal and
overwhelming the art where the other
emotions seem more in tune with it, but perhaps that's the poet artfully
illustrating discord, and the art in these sequences of mostly very short lines
is in the contrast between lines, within lines, between poems leaping from the
very personal to the international, even the international personal, focused on
the people and their struggles so that I am in Baghdad, Belfast, Lebanon, as much
as feeling the poet's loneliness and the poet's joy as though it were my own.
Bloof Books
2007
ISBN: 978-0-6151-6355-0
Remember flying down toward the bay hanging on to the outside of the cable car by the strap like in the commercial only much, much faster,
so fast you can't parse the curves of Lombard Street on your right or the excited cries of tourists who've never seen a simile dangling from a metaphor, cars zipping by inches from your feet, the only thing standing between you and certain death the brakeman ready to drop that giant bolt through the hole in the floor if anything goes wrong, only he isn't really between you and death at all, he's way in the back and for all you know he isn't standing and possibly not even paying any attention and when it finally does come to a stop you're already figuring out how you can get back up to the top
of the hill to do it all again? It's that good. Seriously. Go buy a copy. Now.
Elixir Press
2008
ISBN: 1-932418-25-3
The book was returned to the Post Office undelivered without any notice
where it sat for two weeks alone in its box needing desperately to be read
on the family room couch hands furtively grasping the pages each
word even the slightly overused ones a new but well remembered song which ends
in sleep among the cats in smiling dreams of intertwined and curled pasts
of illicit midnight stalking and the peace of my catharsis. This is art, this is life, this is poetry, and I am still too blissed out to rave adequately.
Coconut Books
2007
ISBN: 978-0-6151-6182-2
Read half way through the giant painful Jackson Mac Low's which isn't fair and I try not to do but necessity. Another thing I try not to do is compare similar but after Harlot and The Halo Rule it will be hard not to, especially with Livingston acknowledging Jill Alexander Essbaum's influence. This is an awesome erotic book, a little less personally in the poet's emotional reaction to the moment than those two other differently great but so well expressed of the intellectual reaction ("Never have I believed in polygamy more...") and more in the moment itself while never saying exactly in a way that I leave best unanalyzed what tricks she's playing with my language centers to recall besides the urgent most obvious in "What There Wasn't Time to Mention" and the sense of identity in crisis throughout both explicitly of the words themselves not quite normally used.
University of California Press
2008
ISBN: 978-0-520-24936-3
The bagpipe is primarily a military instrument, used with the drum to strike fear into the enemy and bring courage to the clans.
In North America in its traditional usage, the bagpipe is most played by small bands ranging in size from five to perhaps twenty pipers with from one to four drums, with the larger bands being led by spectacularly dressed majors.
All bands play the same few well-known tunes but each, being its own small culture, plays them slightly differently.
Imagine yourself as a small lad of vaguely Scottish descent, in the first days of the great warming before anyone realized that something had fundamentally changed, sitting in the stands at the Devon Horse Grounds after wandering the Games for the first hour browsing through the kilt shops and watching the women dance their precise steps and the burly men compete to see who can throw a claymore the furthest or flip a telephone poll in the straightest line, waiting with the crowd for the highlight of the day, if not the year, the massed pipe bands.
Outside the gates there is the shuffling of feet, the soft odd bang of a randomly struck drum or the bleat of a piper tuning, then silence a shout a wailing to make the blood run cold as each band begins to pick up their own version of All the Blue Bonnets Over the Border and the drummers of each join in at their own pace almost coalescing as the gate swings open and five tall men in tall fur hats with long great sticks come strutting in with the mad screaming of over a hundred and fifty pipes and some twenty drums behind them.
This book is a massed bagpipe band of poetry, a huge, unwieldy, strangely familiar, wildly unrhythmic mixture of fear and courage that should be experienced once in every lifetime, that ends suddenly with the same quiet dignity of a single piper playing Amazing Grace at a funeral.
PoemsNotBombs Press
2007
ISBN: 978-0-9796-8110-3
Most of these poems I hear in my head read aloud at rallies, the weather too cold and windy and the words whipping away so that it becomes necessary for a naturally quiet poet to shout. Scattered among them are the sadness of 9/11, the small warm observations, and my personal favorites, the not exactly off-topic humor thrown in for relief and perhaps context (I’m especially fond of Erica’s Exes and To Friends Who Want to Submit). The art and consistent voice are not so much in the language as in the observation, in the contrast of images, celebration of the different, the unique, the simple good diverse inclusive things in life, the art and the poet warmly visible through the shouting.
The University of Chicago Press
2006
ISBN: 978-0-226-70604-7
The unpleasant larger elements of life: despair, loss, abandonment, addiction, prostitution, cancer, suicide, dance trippingly across the neatly ordered triplets of the page, pausing briefly on each to turn a phrase so startlingly daring and unexpected that you need at least to read it twice if not start over from the top.
Coffee House Press
2007
ISBN: 978-1-56689-205-6
I’m sorry to say that sitting down to write this review
a day after I’d finished the book,
I realized I was left with almost no direct memory of what I had read.
Which is kind of what the poems are like.
When the feeling of anticipatory anxiousness before the storm
and the emptiness and possibility after the storm
are the subject and the object of metaphor,
the near-death lightning strikes of humanity or nature are assumed
but never spoken of unless portrayed in a picture which is then itself,
its very pictureness, exquisitely described,
all of this indirection creating emotional distance through intellectualized
and to her credit reasonably evocative word play.
University of California Press
2007
ISBN: 978-0-520-25016-1
The first section kept knocking me unconscious because my brain couldn't take it. The second section made me laugh. The last section I related to the best. I don't know if those were the intended reactions.
This book keeps asking, both explicitly and implicitly, whether or not it is poetry, plus the larger questions of the role of poetry in language and the role of language in reality. As an academic exercise it does a very good job of examining, if not exactly answering, the two larger questions.
But is it poetry? I can answer positively in the negative. It's literary, and it's not any obvious form of prose, so I don't know what else to call it. It certainly possesses a rigor and a beauty of language. But personally I think of poetry as finding exactly the right words and the right form to communicate the poet's insane experience (including, where appropriate, the doubt, uncertainty, and ambiguity) of a spontaneous moment in a way that touches the reader, reminding them at least vaguely of their own experience, and hopefully dragging them along even if they're not completely sure what it is they're experiencing.
The Age of Huts is almost the antithesis of all of that. It's the right words in search of a form, used again and again in many forms. The poem is the experience. It's very carefully thought out, not just
in the communication, which I expect, but even the section I liked best is still the result of a planned exercise in writing. I don't feel dragged into the poet's insane experience so much as assaulted by the poet's insane worldview.
But that's what makes it good at examining the larger questions and for what I liked about it, I recommend buying a copy.
ecco / Harper Collins
2004
ISBN: 978-0-06-075002-2
109 masterfully written pieces of surrealist sting fiction accidentally mislabeled as poems
by a secret society of three and a half foot tall communist ferrets in pointy hats or in
the drawer of the nightstand on the other side of the bed hidden under a stack of decade
old tax returns, a single book-length poem about the absurdity of life and its classification
systems structured to look like a series of unrelated stories. "I cannot tell which, George," I say to myself repeatedly while shaking my head sadly, even though my name isn't George, "I cannot tell which."
Wesleyan University Press
2007
ISBN: 978-0-8195-6850-2
Radioactive emotional subject
matter handled with obvious care from
the spacing and punctuation: choices I may
not understand but can process anyway to the non-obvious plays
on concepts ("trade for" in "The Artist in
Prison" for example) and the unexpected little details that solidify
a joy to read.
Saigon & other poems
Jack Walters
Spuyten Duyvil
2005
ISBN: 1-933132-03-5
With the nature of a man clearly long comfortable and versed in English Walters illustrates moments, mostly from his past, some from imagined others, in the thin places skillfully imbibing them with the swirling context of history and culture. Unfortunately to my reading while I both appreciate and relate, the poems never quite cross over from illustration to art, perhaps because the overwhelming single emotional note is bitterness with a faint supporting echo of melancholy.
Still, well done, and better having read than not.
Kenning Editions
2007
ISBN: 978-0-9767364-1-7
Several poems in voices heard over right shoulder speaking words not on page - weapons-grade poetry, specifically
designed to disrupt logical thought [1] forms to mind an imagined story of a poet putting out a general call for those interested in exploring new
methods of communication [2] answered by some disgruntled Oppenheimer equivalent in a black budget psy-ops Manahattan project
(paper cranes and candles float downstream memorializing those lost in the mass insanity of the deadly haikus unleashed on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki [3]). Poetry non-fashionable correctly applied is virus, understood, applauded, used to inject new socially changing
disruptive ideas through natural order order structure order social construction order defenses no disagreement. Once past the defenses HIV attacks
the actual defense mechanism itself, the entire logical structure of the immune system, rejecting the host as inconsequential, irrelevant,
and too dangerous to be worth saving. Despite appearances of academic re-examination [4] and the use of found vocabularies [5] this is not
Language poetry in the same vein as Ron Silliman [6] masterful intentionalfuckingwith the basic building blocks of the brainmind encoded
schizophrenia you supply [7]
1. Fully acknowledged by the poet on page 161
2. Trans-space Communication, page 54
3. Originally a Monty Python skit with a deadly joke, Germans all die laughing, HA HA.
4. The Fashion Show Poetry Event Essay, "Theater is a fictional representation of something that supposedly happened...", p. 58
5. Code Poems, (Romeo and Juliet, Want Men) are by themselves worth the price of the book
6. See review of The Age of Huts (Compleat), referenced page 111 ("Ron Sillimannother letter") and quoted page 131.
7. ending/warning/moral
left
to reader exercise, may wish to fill to the right margin, or not.
University of California Press
2003
ISBN: 0-520-23553-3
The translator, Shirley Kaufman, refers in her introduction to the poet's mastery
of Hebrew and the difficulty of translating Hebrew poetry into English. I am
left wondering in the English then how much is poet and how much is translator. But
the imagery, the rhythm and the experience powerfully overcome the inherent cultural
barriers of language while placing you in the streets and buses among the dogs, cats, and
people of a very specific very conflicted place and time.
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