SOME HAYSTACKS DON'T EVEN HAVE ANY NEEDLE and Other Complete Modern Poems

by ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 1969

If you appreciated Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle. . . you'll like this equally tart selection, although the bold sans serif type is monotonous. Relatively few poets are represented again (Booth, Guiterman, Hughes, Roethke, and Stafford among them) but the poems here have a comparable bite for the modern reader, as in Rod McKuen's ""The mind is such a junkyard;/ it remembers candy bars/ but not the Gettysburg Address,/ Frank Sinatra's middle name/ but not the day your best friend died."" Vern Rutsala has an album in which ""There/ are no pictures of our brittle, lost intentions"" and in David Wagoner's estimation of ""Staying Alive"" in the cold, ""The bottom of your mind knows all about zero;/ It will turn you over/ And shake you till you waken."" Although there is an undercurrent of alienation, of discontent, there are other, lighter words, for Rutsala's ""fat god of Sunday/ and chocolate bars, watcher/ over picnics and visits to the zoo""; for two seagulls, seen by Frances Savage as ""two medicos"" diagnosing disease ("" 'Ulcer,' screams one; the other shrieks, 'Cirrhosis!'""); from Stafford on ""Kids""--""They dance before they learn/ there isn't anything that isn't music."" There are sections of sorts--animals, sports, etc.--but the impression is of concentric circles of attitudes rather than precise subject groupings. Where the earlier volume had such striking, toned photographs, this has full-color reproductions of modern paintings and sculpture, again right for the moment.

Pub Date: May 15, 1969

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1969

Categories: NONFICTION