Posts Tagged ‘Louisiana State University Press’

The House of Marriage

Wednesday, June 25th, 2008

by Erin  Hanusa
Louisiana State University Press 2008
Reviewed by PJ Gallo

5_5

Quiet Riot

hanusa cover

American poets often teeter over a fine line between individualism and egotism.  On the one hand, such poets have a responsibility to exemplify and elucidate their uniquely American philosophical perspectives—perspectives that likely include some affinity for Emersonian self-reliance and individualism.  On the other hand, personal experience and so-called self-expression are too commonly mistaken for valuable, and the ideal of the self as a vessel for poetic experience is reduced to self-centeredness and artistic tackiness.  Erin Hanusa’s debut, The House of Marriage, wobbles across the aforementioned fine line, sometimes devolving into tedious moments of self-interest and, thankfully, sometimes exploding the self into something larger and more striking.

Throughout the book, Hanusa has a good eye for description and an excellent feel for great words in good places.  In “Beachgrass” for instance, she describes the titular subject: “The backyard sand loomed ineluctably / lunar: nightscape transformed / into a glowing undulation of white.”  Her voice, unmistakably feminine in perspective and subject, moves steadily through each of the book’s four sections and returns repeatedly to motherhood, fatherhood, birth, and the relationships that develop out of each.  Despite these consistencies, there is sometimes an aversive smallness about The House of Marriage that proffers an indifference to the speaker’s assorted and very specific situations.

Where Hanusa’s debut feels like a welcome relief to the ironic, lexical babble that sometimes seems to dominate contemporary poetry, it is often equally self-interested.  Hanusa sometimes mistakes trivial personal moments for moments of broad poignancy.  In “A Bridge Building Competition” for instance, she sandwiches an ambiguous and unconnected stanza about a speaker’s father and sister between two stanzas about a sixth-grade science project.  The transition between the final two stanzas is a good example of Hanusa’s heavy-handedness:

                                   …To list
the things I remember about her
would be to act like she’s dead,
but that would be mistaking her for me.

The weight the teacher loaded on
collapsed my bridge easily.

Veiled by her appealing and sporadic sense of rhythm and rhyme, the emphasis Hanusa places on this blaring temporal leap is obvious and damaging.  Not only is the literal situation of the poem unclear (is the sister dead? is the speaker dead?), but the method of connection through disconnection that occurs between the two stanzas is overused and undeveloped.  Such moments, while uncommon in the book, are unsustainable fabrications, and the strained severity with which she treats this colloquial occurrence undermines the speaker’s obvious sincerity. 

A majority of the poems in the book revolve around colloquial experience, and most of them treat such experience effectively and with great sincerity.  The short final poem of the book, “Conception,” is one such poem, and although its lyric voice strays a bit from that of its preceding poems, it is one of the best in the book and one of the better poems published recently by any press.  Earlier in the book, it seems Hanusa’s more structurally consistent poems are also her most syntactically and thematically consistent.  Her poems of couplets and tercets are often her best, if only because they add a sense of visual formality to her overwhelmingly viscous voice.  For instance “My Father’s Fruit Trees,” a beautiful poem of nostalgia, ends with a touching and comical moment between a father and daughter:

And one morning
he squeezed them, still green,
grunting, forcing resistant

bodies onto the juicer’s spike
spilling pale fluid and seeds.
We drank silently then, waiting

to see who would admit first
the sting of unripe lemon,
not orange, burning in our throats.

Here, in the father and daughter’s collective mistake, emerges a palpable moment of silent awareness between the two characters.  Hanusa’s poems are interested, perhaps primarily, in uncovering and understanding moments of silence as they pervade common life and personal experience.  Hanusa’s speakers are often silent observers of nature or people, and even when they are participants in the goings-on of their own poems, they seem to reflect silently after the fact. 

If the individual poems in Hanusa’s book are sometimes inconsistent, the book is held together tightly by its common thematic threads and its strong voice.  The consistency of these commonalities edges toward monotony, but this is also in part because Hanusa furnishes her speakers with a deliberate and linguistically extravagant sense of the world.  It isn’t without a few standout rough patches, but The House of Marriage is a capable debut, and while Hanusa’s mode of quiet contemplation may have a relatively specific contemporary audience, her intelligence is obvious and praiseworthy.

*

Tags: , , ,
Posted in reviews


Sex at Noon Taxes

Wednesday, May 7th, 2008

by Sally Van Doren
Louisiana State University Press 2008
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

5

Borrow or Rob?

borrow or robDespite the charming palindrome title reminiscent of Sexton’s “Rats Live on No Evil Star,” Sally Van Doren’s Sex at Noon Taxes lacks a sense of necessity that is requisite to producing successful and demanding poems. The poems in this collection are rather easy, and I’ll explain what I mean in a moment. First, let me say a few things about the title.

The title is, perhaps, the most complex and interesting part of this book. It is clever in that it provides two topics that are somehow in opposition. Sex, an act often completed out of love, desire or lust—all exciting and pleasurable—and taxes, ugh. Very few people look forward to doing their taxes. It is a hateful time of year associated with stress, anger, and bitterness for our wonderful country. These contrasting themes offer much to think about. The title begins the book with a sense of complexity and a need to order things, to understand this theme of antagonism or conflict our lives are filled with. However, it seems the palindrome never belongs to the poet. The first poem in the collection is of same name and includes a note indicating that the poem and the book are titled after an Ed Ruscha painting titled Sex at Noon Taxes. Unfortunate…  Anne Sexton’s famous palindrome, Rats Live on No Evil Star, was also not hers. She saw this title on the side of a barn in Ireland. Borrowing or taking is never inherently undesirable. It is how the poet uses that which is not her own to drive at their own truths that is essential.

For Van Doren, few things seem to be vital. There is rarely a sense of urgency or conflict in the poems. Not general conflict, but rather a conflict that demands a resolution, that demands that the reader be involved in searching for that resolution, that truth. In a conversation with Harry Moore, Anne Sexton said, “I’m still talking to myself, which is what you do when you write a poem, I’m afraid.” I don’t disagree with Sexton often; however, this statement is incomplete. Yes, a poet is speaking to him or herself when the poem begins, at its start, but by the end, by the completion of the poem as an entity, which requires it being read by someone else, then the poem meets its inevitable transformation. Once the poem is read, it is amplified; it expands to include the interpretation of the reader and the reader’s engagement in the poem, the truths the reader brings to it. Van Doren’s poems are not open to this transformation.

The poems I am referring to specifically are those like “Conjunction,” “Pronoun/Punctuation,” “Primur” and “Marriage.” The first two of these four feel pompous and splashy. They don’t offer much substance and virtually no conflict as they speak of the obvious bits of punctuation and grammar indicated in their titles. “Primur” also comes off as self-important, and certainly does not invite the reader in. It nods to Harryette Mullen in Sleeping with the Dictionary. “Primur” is written somewhat phonetically: “Bedder not tew admit that / the auther of the pome”…“hs mor to say than the vegetable / berger sizzling ovur charcoles…” Other than slowing the reader down a bit, these misspellings add little to the poem. The poem is what it is; it comes across as simple and unimportant. Once the words are understood, the same message is conveyed. I get annoyed. But annoyed is not nearly as bad as grossed-out.  See “Marriage” which contains the following nastiness: “…fart-splattered walls…” and “To Become World” which ends:

…With a pair of tweezers, she
plucked out every pubic hair

and affixed them to her chin.
She stroked her beard
when she spoke and listened.

All this lousy criticism is not to say that the poet doesn’t fight for and achieve some wonderful truths. One such triumph can be found in “Equinox.” Here the poet works to understand time’s structure and character, the ways in which it influences our lives and the fact that in our struggle to piece together its movement, we fail. Time affects everything, and despite our efforts to comprehend it and retard it, it presses on:

How to measure the space between
the bed three nights ago and a car pulling
in the driveway? And what did Time sound like?
It was iambic, a rising beat hidden in the trope,
turning at the sight of him. Someone had given
permission to isolate them from the closure of a day.

It is in these normal occurrences such as a “car pulling in the driveway” that we encounter the need to understand time and to attach a formal measurement to it. Here the poet makes a connection with the experience and the reader and though no clearly defined resolution can be found, we do find common experience.

There are also poems in which Van Doren calls her readers together. They are persuasive and contain sudden bursts of excitement and motivation, for example, in “Oasis”:

…and any encounter
with a cactus is just that; pluck out
the offending needle and
continue.

While certain encounters can be offensive and disturbing, all are something to be learned from. We can gain from all life experiences if we choose to “continue.” Sex at Noon Taxes suffers from too few of these telling and conjoint poems. We need more of the unexpected, more of the poems that communicate because they must. They excavate the poet’s experiences and bits of consciousness that must be uncovered because even though the poet may be talking to herself, the things of which she speaks are things in which we can all find realities.

*

Tags: , , ,
Posted in reviews


The Long Fault

Wednesday, April 9th, 2008

by Jay Rogoff
Louisiana State  University Press 2008
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

3_5

Good Title

rogoff cover

I’ve been putting off writing this review because I kept holding out hope that I’d find something to say that wouldn’t sound unfounded and embittered. The Long Fault pulls out all the old goodies: Adam & Eve, Cain & Abel, Tristan & Isolde, Helen of Troy, Virgil, Freud, Donne, Shelley, Milton, Einstein, Pynchon. The list is long as it is predictable. Relying so heavily on referencing biblical, historical, and literary figures to induce interest is something I’ve always been wary of as it often distracts from the real substance. Unfortunately, Rogoff’s poems are no exception.

The first poem, “Cain’s Gift” has poignant opening and closing lines, but there is little in between. “The blood cried up from the ground…” Blood gurgling below the earth’s surface is an image that recalls any act of physical force that has created fear and suffering. In today’s world it may be the Iraq war, 9-11, Sean Bell, a child being beaten in the Bronx, a young woman raped in DUMBO, Michael Vick putting a bullet in the back of a pitbull’s skull. It’s meaningful and universal. Blood is universal.

The final line of the poem—“out to beget the world”—gives the impression that the reader is about to embark upon a journey that will lead someplace specific, someplace ultimately knowable, that will reduce the suffering to something that can be understood, something that we can envelope despite our smallness. Not so. But in this way, it is at least realistic.

Though blood provides a reliable thread throughout the first half of the book, it gradually disappears, abandons the reader in dark, threatening territory. That’s what was so frustrating about the collection: themes that materialize and vanish without warning just when we begin to trust and rely on their presence. But we are not left without hope. Often Rogoff supplies us with the necessary motivation to continue, as in “Sublimated.” The narrator of this poem is very much alone. He pontificates on how he would like to die. Not that he would take his own life—if he were possible to choose his end without inflicting it. Engrossing oneself in thoughts of one’s own death is perhaps the most solitary experience that can be achieved but for death itself. However, there is light at the end of this tunnel: “some human element survives.”

So, what does survive? In “Aspirations” we see a deep appreciation for the physical body that transports us through this “journey.” The narrator affectionately exclaims, “I rose to an unpinioned aspiration: / to keep intact my bundle of meat and blood.” The body must survive until its time comes, but during this time it is easy to let such a durable, trustworthy part of oneself go unappreciated, be taken for granted, be abused. This is some of the better stuff in the book.

From there, Rogoff takes off into the world of photography. In Rogoff, real life is more interesting. “In Camera” is the most successful of these photography poems. It gets really good when it gets real and phorgets the photograph. The final lines read:

Neither gin nor
               formaldehyde, not even
      the polished, hand-joined oak
coffin’s casement window
      from which you cast your
                 frozen last look,
                 could put the trick
                       across, the bright illusion
you were at rest, or warm.

Sad, but real. Other than these nice, neat moments The Long Fault doesn’t seem to form a whole, and the lack of consistency or movement becomes an obstacle for the reader and often disables them from connecting with the poems.

When Rogoff gets dense and wordy, I suggest reading the poems in a British accent. It livens things up: “no goony bird hovers.” Try it. Rogoff also makes an attempt to startle the reader, though I’m afraid it falls flat. In “Just Say the Word,” Rogoff’s smart language is suggestive and provocative: “pious girls spread throughout the church.” Maybe I’m just sick, but when I read that, the phrase “pious girls spread” just leaps off the page. It’s among the few moments that do.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in reviews


The Piercing

Tuesday, March 6th, 2007

by Christine Garren
Louisiana State University Press 2006
Reviewed by Matt Soucy

7

Living Clarity

garren coverIn Christine Garren’s new book, The Piercing, you will encounter some traditionally “poetic” imagery: leaves, ponds, old lovers, bits of garbage.  Fortunately, Garren manages to make them her own in an impressively personal display.  It’s poetry that looks and feels exactly like poetry but still offers a genuine poetic experience. How rare.

The book begins almost mired in nostalgia but soon moves beyond that narrowly subjective condition to examine the condition itself.  The result is a set of small, sophisticated poems that exhibit that uncontrollable expansion and contraction of time in a person’s mind.  The duration of a longtime friendship is comparable to a boy jumping off of a pier; an afternoon is comparable to a romance.

An instantaneous, paramount present hinges upon the massive action of a past that is constantly fading, synthesizing, and reducing itself into the small packages of “feeling” we are left with.  “The Piercing”, which closes the book, emphasizes and solidifies this theme.  Garren equates the loss of a loved one with an ear piercing:

                        …this

millimeter’s-width opening is for a decade to fit through.

Look, there you go.  There I go—there our landscape goes as if

through a fantastical roof’s hole, the shingle pulled off, the nail off—

our death is

flying over the city.

Garren’s images are more traditionally associated with concepts of objectivism or those transcendent moments when a social or natural experience pulls the author outside of him- or herself.  She artfully confuses the moment and expansiveness of life:

                …I felt
an insect step across my hand, across a vein
while my body was still closer to its birth than to its death.

There is a recurring suggestion that experience is formed in memory more so than it exists as an entity in and of itself.  In “The Swimmers” Garren describes boys swimming off of a pier in early evening.  Somehow, “from so long ago, this / has gained such force inside me.” The past is always abstract and overwhelming, but Garren has used precision and poise to control the depth of a lifetime.

*

Tags: , , ,
Posted in reviews


Kitchen Heat

Monday, October 23rd, 2006

by Ava Leavell Haymon
Louisiana State University Press 2006
Reviewed by David Sewell

5_5

If you can’t stand the title…

haymon coverTrees are great. I remember once listening to some geezer prattle on, going as far as to call them amazing. He further established his geezerness by adding, “Their merely being there means something; that soon we may touch, love, explain.” I must say that I was a little taken aback—we had just met and already he was being this forward with me. But that is, perhaps, heading too far down the wrong road.
   
Trees are great because, where I’m from (earth), they’re disabused of their leaves every fall, and every spring new leaves fill the trees like so many green birds returned from their winter quarters. Related or not to this photoperiodic process, the trees themselves grow year to year, reaching higher and higher into the sky, thrusting farther and farther away from the niggling concerns of us human beings. Really, trees are something amazing.

But poets are not trees. Perhaps not all people who write poems are poets, but perhaps that has nothing to do with our purpose here (I’ll let you know when I find out what that is). Ava Leavell Haymon is a woman with an interesting name who lives in Louisiana and writes poems about small things that, by the peculiar alchemy that is poetry, become larger. Whether this is a trick of the light, whether mirrors and small German children named Hans who have a smoking habit are involved, or whether an actual chemical change has been effected is a question that will take some time to address. But first, lest you, dearest reader who has taken a break from looking at pornography, think I’m a lunatic with a thing for trees, let’s get back to the idea of the first paragraph.

Most or many of the poems in this book, which is not a selected or collected, were written and published a long time ago (some even in journals that are still extant). As the acknowledgments reveal, one poem was published in a journal in 1985. That’s over twenty years ago, to you and me. Many poems were published in the eighties, many in the nineties—including a good chunk culled from chapbooks published in 1991 and 1994.

Why is this at all relevant? Because this is 2006, and including poems from so far back, which one of the blurb writers amusingly refers to as “her marvelous new poems,” says something about the poet, the publisher, and the poems. (As a person who enjoys comedy writing, I usually take the time to read the backs of poetry books.) And it’s not like Haymon hasn’t published a book in the past twenty years—she just published one (coming in at a scant 52 pages) in 2004.

This sort of curatorial anachronism argues any number of points: that the poems’ quality is of the timeless variety, that their concerns are of the timeless variety, that, perhaps, the poems have been collected around a particular theme, rather than just collected from some period in her writing career. It also suggests that the poet hasn’t been doing much writing lately.

Haymon’s poems deal with her relationships—with her husband (largely the first section, “Choosing Monogamy”), with others when she was a child (largely the second section), and with her children when they were growing up (largely the third section). The poems are full of characters, most of them family members. Grandma may be in Boca now instead of a chaise on the first floor and little Cindy may have become emancipated at fourteen instead of marrying a plow, but the basic paradigms of these relationships have not moved much. My point: 20-year-old poems about familial relations shouldn’t necessarily feel dated today—even if the escaped lunatics who fill the radio and television airwaves with their ravings are right that our culture is coming apart like a Kazakhstani space shuttle on reentry (disclosure: they’re not).

The poems in the first section of the book take some interesting turns: “On the screen in a darkened movie house, my own breasts / glowed back at me from a dressing-room mirror” (“Rare Night Out”). “I bring a rhinoceros with me,” she writes in “Endangered Habitat,” a villanelle (which is actually pronounced “guzzle”) about desire and monogamy. The poems chew on monogamy and all its requisite ingredients/themes, as poets sometimes do, by employing the imagination. We have the beloved’s body parts, the acts of eating (sometimes, understandably, the beloved’s body), hunting and fishing (in the literal and the metaphoric sense), a phallic rhinoceros horn. Monogamy is difficult she seems to be saying, especially when rhinoceroses are involved. “The only trouble with monogamy / is that it’s not what we long for / and know we can never have.” Word.

The poems in the section also, regrettably, take a few ho-hum turns. “I want to rub your hands / between mine. I want to rub / your back and legs with / cedar-smelling oils,” from “Choosing Monogamy”), adds up to not exactly Justin Timberlake-¬sexy territory (though, in truth, Justin is just now bringing sexy back—these poems, being as old as they are, were no doubt written at a time when sexy was missing [presumably, it had burrowed deep into Burt Reynolds’ mustache]). And that’s a bit of a problem when the section is, more or less, about sex. But, a few other light missteps aside, the section is a successful monograph on monogamy.

“My grandmother sent me out to get the eggs,” begins the poem “First Grandchild Breaks the Egg with No Shell,” a typical enough poem for the second section. A common rural event makes the turn to violence and potential life lessons:

Next morning I saw our breakfast eggshells,
crushed, in a saucer in the bright chicken yard.
The hens were pecking at them,
eyeing me—standing on one foot
outside the fence—with the lidless gaze
chickens turn on the enemy.

Other themes of this section: grandparents and uncles, Sunday school and lost teeth, old photographs, family recipes, Christmases, birthdays—simple things all, but decent fodder for these sorts of poems.

The third section is again a bit adventurous, relatively speaking—lines stretch to the end of the page, alignments go wacky, the character Denmother (a sort of everymom/antimom) makes several appearances. A sonnet about her daughter cheekily begins, “She’s 14.” (The preceding poem talks about her son at thirteen years old. Unfortunately, the poem about her daughter is the fifteenth in the section, and the one about her son is the fourteenth. Oh well.)

This line from “Invocation,” which begins the last section, explains a lot of what Haymon’s up to in the book: “Inhabit my kitchen: / It’s here, only here / I can believe and not recoil. / Here, if anywhere, time stills.” Will do.

Again, most of the poems in the section, as in the rest of the book, are about small things: carving a pumpkin, domestic rituals, family vacations. But Haymon does manage to make interesting poetry out of the mundane, and her perspective is brave and honest (she says of her son, “he floods me through with Queen Jocasta’s joy”). The poems—which heavily favor standard syntax, complete sentences, images and a strong narrative element—are well crafted and, with the passing of time, I’d assume, they’d gain in significance.

It’s clear that this is not the poetry of the future, and I have my doubts that it’s even the poetry of the present. Then again, deserts in the American West are littered with thousands of quartz Ozymandiases that once stood as tall trees.

*

Tags: , , ,
Posted in reviews


Coming to Rest

Sunday, June 18th, 2006

by Kathryn Stripling Byer
Louisiana State University Press 2006
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

3

Pumpkins for Absence

byer coverKathryn Stripling Byer’s poems in Coming to Rest are often indulgently sweet.  The plush language and potentially captivating narrative are dulled by excessive sentimentality. The title poem of the book comes early on in Part 1 and immediately reveals Byer’s inability to let a stanza or a poem come to its natural ending point.  The first section of this poem is engaging; the speaker tells the story of a mother whose child has died and obsessively she asks her remaining children to name their first daughter after their dead sibling.  This compulsion seems to be what initially drives the poem into the second section, but Byer doesn’t allow it to do its work.  Rather, she continues:

Another name for letting go.
Or holding on.
Another name for home.

These lines are redundant, over-explanatory, and worse, they are distracting from the provocative nature of the previous lines.

Byer continues the poem in this fashion, with overwritten lines like, “I’m trapped in a coma / of middle-aged dullness” that evoke frustration rather than sympathy.  She does manage to end the fourth section nicely, though the fifth section seems extraneous.  The speaker has been visited by the dead child from the beginning of the poem whom we find out would have been her aunt.  The speaker is glad for the meeting and refers to the aunt as “this dust I’ve stirred from/ sleep.  This shell of light.”

Still, Byer is able to draw us in here and there in the first few sections. Coming to Rest is dedicated to her daughter, a fitting and obvious choice after the fourth consecutive poem that has to do with missing her.  This midsection of the book is overbearing and difficult to avoid skimming, but by the fourth “daughter” poem something unexpected happens, a sort of renewal.  Just when we’re sick of hearing about it Byer manages to draw us in one final time.  She describes her flight to Chicago to see her daughter and rather than focusing on the emotional reunion she observes the stratosphere from her window:

…lapis lazuli and white
shag carpet all the way there.
Nobody at home up here.

She momentarily gives in to her loneliness, the feeling that she has been left behind by her daughter and accepts it as not a wholly bad thing.

If there is one thing Kathryn Stripling Byer has down it’s creating a sincere sense of loneliness, not necessarily a pitiable loneliness, but often, a desirable one.  In “Stopping” the loneliness seems satisfying.  The speaker is coming back to an empty house, but somehow she is able to reconcile with the unoccupied space. “Nobody to welcome us home but the jiggety-jig / of these bugs in the glow of our headlights.”  What is slightly distracting is the use of “us” and “our” meaning that someone is in the car with her and therefore she is not alone, making it difficult to give in to the poem’s vital sense of solitude.

Byer is most successful when she is strange.  In “Halloween” the speaker has an imagined conversation with a pumpkin:

If I asked him, the pumpkin
would say he knows nothing of this. Let us pumpkins
be pumpkins, he’d say.

The talking pumpkin is the most interesting thing in this poem.  It’s funny; not particularly complex, but who cares.  The pumpkin just wants to be left the hell out of it.  Unfortunately it seems the pumpkin isn’t meant to be the center of the poem.  The focus is a young girl masquerading as a princess; she is less interesting.  It isn’t surprising to see a young girl pretending to be a princess from time to time, especially at Halloween.

On rare occasions, her sentimentality is successful.  The speaker in “Empty,” a mother, details what it is like to leave a daughter at college.  It is sad for the speaker, but it is also an opportunity.  We learn from the poem that the speaker’s own mother was overbearing and unable to let go of her children and that this is a chance for the speaker to do right where her mother might have failed.  By the end of the poem she has realized, “This is her city now,/ let her stand at the heart of it.”  She allows her daughter to own her new life, “Its welcoming emptiness.”

The final lines of the book are also some of the most gratifying.  Byer concludes by describing the souls of the world constantly leaving and returning as a “swish of an icy/ mare’s tail over the December sky.”

*

Tags: , , ,
Posted in reviews


Half Wild

Wednesday, May 17th, 2006

by Mary Rose O’Reilley
Louisiana State University Press 2006
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

3

A Load of Warm Souls

oreilly cover

The word “soul” is printed fifteen times in Mary Rose O’Reilley’s Walt Whitman Award winning book, which is probably too many for any single volume of poetry.  Predictably, her obsession with the soul signals a preoccupation with death, a well-worn path in poetry that much of O’Reilly’s book travels.

This preoccupation begins with the first poem “Twin,” probably the finest poem in the collection.  It explores the partial death of the self.  The speaker seems to have lost a twin either before or during birth, and says, “You were the part of me/ that gave itself to death.”  This death is haunting, especially with such gruesomely scientific words as “caul,” the portion of the amnion that covers the head of a fetus at birth.  The poem ends with a couplet, “Sometimes I waken/ with an infant’s shriek” and we suddenly find ourselves in a dark and cryptic world.

O’Reilley has many ways of measuring death in her poems.  Arguably the most effective is making visible the remnants of a life, as she does in “The Dead.”  Here she accuses the dead of having been too careful in life, as well as in the preparation for death:

their clocks never
run down,
their silverware
shines in its coats.

As often as her poems are based in the reality of life and death, O’Reilley sometimes enters a world of fantasy.  In “Bluebeard’s Wife” she doesn’t abandon the subject of death, but addresses it by retelling the story of Bluebeard, a serial killer that murdered each of his wives and stored their bodies in a forbidden room.  The speaker says of the newest wife, “she’s had so much practice/ not smelling the dead.”  These lines imply the wife’s forged reality and life of denial—a startling moment in the poem, somehow more so than when she writes, “the murdered women/ will stir.”

Some of the most successful and inviting poems in the book deal with the title theme, Half Wild.  The imaginative life of stones is presented in “Field Guide to North Shore Geology” which begins, “the stones are telling each other lies.”  We are let in on the secret lives of stones and O’Reilley’s relationship with them.  Another poem, “Scholar’s Garden,” details a scholar’s fondness for ravens and his preference for ravens over crows.  The speaker says of the scholar, “He once knew a raven who spoke Mandarin passably well.”

Despite the well executed dark tone, O’Reilley’s language often veers into the over-dramatic.  In “Sister Joanna Washes the Floor” she writes, “a deck worn soft/ at the margins of mystery.”  The “margins of mystery” don’t inform us about the deck of cards or anything else.  Other poems, like “Home Farm,” indulge in lines like “relentless desire” that are not only overwrought but set in italics to further emphasize the unnecessary.  These indulgences act as a disinvitation.

At her best, however, O’Reilley undoubtedly manages to recreate and call forth the wild impulse within us all.  Finally, our “skin puckers, thins,/ breaks into feathers” and we “belong to ourselves no longer.”

*

Tags: , , ,
Posted in reviews