Mini review #17, John Ashbery, The Mooring of Starting Out, The Double Dream of Spring. This is a very odd collection, by turns full of joy then dystopian. There are times when he rhymes every line and times he rhymes evey other line. In general he doesn’t rhyme at all. In general he seems to be criticizing factories and the rise of capitalism. Here are a few lines that show his ambivalance in rhyme: “When, beside a window, one feels evening prevail / Who is there who can receive its slanting veil / And not regret day that bore it on its stream / Whether day was joy or under evil’s regime. In the poem “Parergon” he opens with “We are happy with our way of life.” In “Clouds” he talks about the day digging the grave of tomorrow and wishful thinking that both confines and uplifts. “The rise of capitalism parallels the advance of romanticism” he writes in Definition of Blue. Its as if he wants to praise and critique our way of life at the same time. There are whole passages about the factories dying. Other’s that compare our lives to flowers that live through the full cycle, dry up and then blow away. A very challenging book that walks the line between capitalism as narcissism and capitalism as romanticism in disguise. I don’t think it takes a genius to decide where his sympathies lie. 3.5 out of 5 stars.
Mini review #16, The Mooring of Starting Out, Rivers and Mountains. This is a gorgeous collection full of varied content. “Into the Dusk-Charged Air” is a poem about rivers — locations, depths, colors, and smells. For example “The Liffey is full of sewage,/ Like the Seine, but unlike/ the brownish-yellow Dordogne.” There’s the Niagara and Oder, the Moskowa and St. Lawrence to name a few. Poem after poem has light and dark, white and dark stars. In the Ecclesiast, we have the following line: “The night is cold and delicate and full of angels/ Pounding down the living.” The real gem is a long poem called “The Skaters”. It begins with ice skating and talks about snow and the joy of sex. It moves on to talk about a ship, snow, mountains, trees, the history of costumes, snow in the stove so that writing could be accomplished. There are animals throughout, in a dream sequence in which the narrator falls asleep and dreams about sex. 3.5 out 5 stars
Mini review #15, John Ashbery, The Mooring of Starting Out, The Tennis Court Oath. This, his second collection, is light years better than Some Trees, and we begin to see some of the longer forms he’ll work with later in his career. The problem with this book is that it is unbalanced. Early-on it is all beautifully, if strangely, written. “How Much Longer Will I be Able to Inhabit the Divine Sepulcher,” for example, is a divinely written poem about yearning in a style that only Ashbery can write in. The book alternates between short and long poems and feels a little unbalanced because of it. He’s beginning to move text around on the page, like the 27-page poem “Europe.” And then there’re poems like the 10 line “A White Paper”. Thematically, the work gets more and more bizarre the deeper into the book we get. Too often, as with Some Trees, he slips into nearly non-sensical verbiage. This time, however, we begin to see that quite a bit of his work is developing multiple meanings. Words that sight rhyme, words that rhyme, meanings that extend beyond the obvious text. 3.25 out of 5 stars.
Mini-review #14, John Ashbury, The Mooring of Starting Out — Some Trees. Though Ashbery has grown into a major American poetry figure, this book, his first, is not very good. For example: The young man places a bird-house/Against the blue sea. He walks away/ And it remains. Now other //Men appear, but they live in boxes./ The sea protects them like a wall./ The gods worship a line-drawing// Of… a woman, in the shadow of the sea/ Which goes on writing. In addition to near non-nonsense the entire book has recurring images of trees, waves, and flowers. The syntax is tortured, awkward, often making very little sense. Despite this, he sometimes comes up with lines that are just mind-blowingly cool. The long prose poem The Instruction Manual with its shifting locations and tender lines is clearly the highlight of this book. 2.75 out of 5 stars.
Mini-review #13, James Armstrong, Blue Lash. I’m just going to come right out and say that this is a terrible book. It doesn’t have much in the way of subject matter — Lake Superior, boats, loons, the fish of the lake, and various shipwrecks. All of these things wouldn’t be so bad except the poetry is overwritten. I’m going to include a few lines from a few poems so that you know what I mean. [B]efore protozoa, before the airplane/ before the poet/whose bones are eternal…really? A poets bones are eternal? Another: green as an aphid among hard pebbles. Or: we trust the gray inanimate// stone that does not move,/the stars that move unchangingly. So we trust the unchanging rock, which is really changing imperceptibly, but do not trust the stars because they do not change? Wow. In nearly every poem the color blue appears along some grossly overwritten passage that is clearly not factual even in the sense of metaphor. And I mean every poem. It’s enough to make you want to set the book on fire and then stomp on it. 2 out of 5 stars.
Mini-review #12, Rae Armantrout, Next Life. …words are more precise than sight, Armantrout writes in this spare collection. The poems are often heady — being, the present, the future. What can words say? she asks later in the book, as if to contradict herself. Of course words are precise, but they are never enough for experience itself. What is that experience? We live by faith alone, she writes in another poem. We desire to be credible, we desire love. In these poems Armantrout writes of all the existential things that make us human, the ways we name things, and the way we experience the world around us. Relentlessly honest, Cole Swenson writes. A field of brilliant and convincing shards, David Antin writes. Our lives are ultimately fractured and unknowable, but we try — our experiences ultimately define us and our world beliefs. 4 out of 5 stars.
Mini-review #11, Aaron Anstett, Each Place the Body’s. God I love poetry, and books like this are the reason why. Anstett is a prestidigitator with words. The style is musical, startling, and often disjunctive. He writes of dreams and interrogations, skeletons (comparing himself to one), birds, tattoos, bees, mice, out of body experiences — in short the common made extraordinary through uncommonly beautiful language. Quite often Anstett’s characters are beginners, and while he could go on and on about it, it is just mentioned in passing and the effect is seen in the poem itself (for example, suicide with a starter’s pistol). Anstett is one of our most valuable poets, and clearly in a league with much more “mature” poets. 4.2 out of 5 stars.
Mini-review #10, Ralph Angel. Exceptions and Melancholies. Ralph is a brilliant writer who writes with a style all his own. His style is kind of a mix between discursive and hyperbole, but the style meshes all the way through and that’s what makes it work. His style is not like other poets who write in a similar vein (James Tate, John Ashbery), who are brilliant in their own ways. Ralph, however…, might just be one of the best poets writing. Take this short example from “Anxious Latitudes” On a clear day I’m busy directing landscapes/ not really shoving the shrubs around/ not ordering pastel houses from the hillsides/but carrying them with me like a frayed // photograph in my wallet, so that I might read it / as a small corner of its vaster itinerary. Every line, weird as it might seem, contributes further to the whole. This is a lesson poets who write hyperbolically need to learn. 4.2 out of 5 stars.
Mini-review #9, John Amen, Christening the Dancer. I had mixed feelings about this book when it was released, and since then I have come to decide that the book is not very good. It is filled with similes, and Amen seems obsessed with his penis and scrotum. I like that the book pushes the envelope, as it were, and goes out into uncharted, if often violent, territory, but the images are as vile as nightmares that shift for no apparent reason. Kudos to Amen for trying to invent a form, or to work with a form that seems more like abstract painting. I have a feeling that with a few more books under his belt, he will be a force to be reckoned with. John, get rid of all your “likes” — there must be three in every poem. John, get rid of all the blood. This reads like Saw meets Matisse. 2 out of 5 stars.
Mini-review #8, George Amabile, Tasting the Dark. This is a hard book to pin down. On one hand it clearly shows the markers of lyric writing, but it is infused with language not often found in lyric texts. There are so many brilliant poems in this Canadian poet’s book, it’s hard to know where to start. He writes of the death of his thirteen year old brother when a tire blows and he is hit by a dump truck. He writes of grief, and the ocean, and the soft voice of his seven year old son asking when he is coming home. There is a long poem about brick laying and the master that taught him his craft, how to color the bricks to make designs for some of his richer customers. The real gem, however, is Misericordia General, which spans about eight pages and speaks of soldiers, brick layers, gulls — the nature of things. Some of the language is a bit odd and he often slips into histrionic writing. I can forgive those sins, though, for a book this good. 3.8 out of 5 stars.