GREEN

by Sidney Wade ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 30, 1998

This second volume by the Florida poet, married to fiction writer Padgett Powell, shares with him a love of everyday weirdness and luxuriant language, a mix of high and low diction that here makes from some truly remarkable verse. Wade smartly cloaks her sloppier emotions in classically pure lines, so tight that each word is a revelation, whether she's ruing marriage in a sonnet or cheating Death by rescuing her own daughter, fallen from a dock. A number of poems set in Istanbul play with the clash of East and West, and celebrate the city's smokey sights and pungent smells by imagining them absent; Wade admires the ""masculine cadences"" of a woman singing in a Turkish bath, and hears the echoes of ""failed empires"" in the Bosphorus. Domestically, with ""wayward words,"" she practices a down-home ""Bricolage,"" and poises herself for ""the calm/before catastrophe;"" she waxes mythic in the Laundromat and lets a dog have his day (""Dog Sonnet""). There's definitely ""something resonant, fluent and profound"" in Wade's ""acutely skeptical rendering of form""-it's a pleasure to watch each new and varied discovery.

Pub Date: April 30, 1998

ISBN: 157003267X

Page Count: 90

Publisher: Univ. of South Carolina

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1998

Categories: FICTION