A welcome, if modest, diversion from one of America’s ablest poets.
An interesting experiment from former poet laureate Strand, whose last collection (Blizzard of One, 1998) won the Pulitzer Prize. This one consists of 20 poems of about 25 lines in length, each constructed around the repetition of a single word (hence the title). Given this seemingly restrictive structuring gambit, Strand exercises considerable imagination and wit in manipulating the form, occasionally taking advantage of the ability of his key word to act as more than one part of speech, but mostly utilizing subtle shifts in tone and register to vary the verse (all the more remarkable since the metrics are pretty similar throughout the entire volume). The individual lines run the gamut from surrealist juxtapositions (“The diamond-studded casket for the missing hand”) to gnomic fortune cookies (“A journey is one step too many”), from comic one-liners (“Loving the foot means loving a heel”) to carefully rendered images out of a haiku or imagist poem (“The sun throws down a ladder of light”). For the most part, the connection from line to line consists of the repetition of the key word, but occasionally Strand will string two or three lines together for comic effect (most tellingly in the “journey” poem). The result is a surprisingly engaging, if somewhat limited set of poems, mostly in a light-hearted vein, and an impressive technical feat that is not without its pleasures. In that respect, it is of a piece with his previous work, with its gentle and quiet wit.
A welcome, if modest, diversion from one of America’s ablest poets.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2000
ISBN: 1-885983-45-X
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Turtle Point
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
The previous books of this author (Devil of a State, 1962; The Right to an Answer, 1961) had valid points of satire, some humor, and a contemporary view, but here the picture is all out—from a time in the future to an argot that makes such demands on the reader that no one could care less after the first two pages.
If anyone geta beyond that—this is the first person story of Alex, a teen-age hoodlum, who, in step with his times, viddies himself and the world around him without a care for law, decency, honesty; whose autobiographical language has droogies to follow his orders, wallow in his hate and murder moods, accents the vonof human hole products. Betrayed by his dictatorial demands by a policing of his violence, he is committed when an old lady dies after an attack; he kills again in prison; he submits to a new method that will destroy his criminal impulses; blameless, he is returned to a world that visits immediate retribution on him; he is, when an accidental propulsion to death does not destroy him, foisted upon society once more in his original state of sin.
What happens to Alex is terrible but it is worse for the reader.
Pub Date: Jan. 8, 1962
ISBN: 0393928098
Page Count: 357
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1962
SEEN & HEARD
A fine demonstration of the power and versatility of Glück’s verse, this volume will delight fans and intrigue newcomers.
Glück’s international reputation as an accomplished and critically acclaimed contemporary poet makes the arrival of her new volume an eagerly anticipated event. This slender collection meets these expectations with 44 poems that pull the reader into a realm of meditation and memory. She sets most of them in the heat of summer—a time of year when nature seems almost oppressively heavy with life—in order to meditate on the myriad realities posed by life and death. Glück mines common childhood images (a grandmother transforming summer fruit into a cool beverage, two sisters applying fingernail polish in a backyard) to resurrect the intense feelings that accompany awakening to the sensual promises of life, and she desperately explores these resonant images, searching for a path that might reconcile her to the inevitability of death. These musings produce the kinds of spiritual insights that draw so many readers to her work: she suggests that we perceive our experiences most intensely when tempered by memory, and that such experiences somehow provide meaning for our lives. Yet for all her metaphysical sensitivity and poetic craftsmanship, Glück reaffirms our ultimate fate: we all eventually die. Rather than resort to pithy mysticism or self-obsessive angst, she boldly insists that death creeps in the shadows of even our brightest summers. The genius of her poems lies in their ability to sear the summertime onto our souls in such a way that its “light will give us no peace.”
A fine demonstration of the power and versatility of Glück’s verse, this volume will delight fans and intrigue newcomers.Pub Date: April 9, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-018526-0
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
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