I Am On Goodreads...Here Are Some Capsule Reviews I posted there...

I joined Goodreads sometime during the summer but haven't been on much until lately. Here are some capsule reviews I posted on there. If you are on Goodreads too and would like to add me as a friend I would be honored.


NOTES FOR ECHO LAKE, MICHAEL PALMER

Half of this book is rather tepid throwback surrealism. The other half varies from good to great poetry. Palmer's position in the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E pantheon has always been rather marginal. One wonders if the language poets were jealous of his assimilation into the culture...which seems to have been much easier for him than for the inner cadre of more formalistically intrepid writers. This faster assimilation was no doubt due to the fact that he was basically writing in a received tradition and just importing certain shared modi operandi (disjunctive methodology, linguistic concerns,etc.) He basically writes a lyric poetry rich in surreal imagery, which means his writing was more recognizable as poetry to obtuse people when it appeared. He's at least half French and his warm friendships with French poetry (famously Hocquard and Albiach) are more than personal...they are cultural. He is a bridge figure as such and interesting in that regard also. Poems that I love in here would include "Song of the Round Man," many poems from the titular sequence, and the tiny but powerful "A book of." There are others. It's worth owning. And it has great cover art by Irving Petlin, creepyasfuck. I like the recent poetry I've been seeing by him and really want to pick up that Company of Moths book (is that the title?). I love when he writes those tiny knifelike poems that reflect the world with their cold metallic surface. A difficult art to master!


VITA NOVA, LOUISE GLUCK

This is my favorite Gluck book of those I've read (not nearly all). I don't know what my favorite is among those I have not read yet. I love the fun she has with the lyric tradition. People so often misread her as this uber-sincere, confessional writer, when I think she actually skewers the personal lyric tradition more cogently and hilariously than so many avant-garde poets (who tend to be much more ham-fisted in their attacks). The way she gets herself out of this collection (the final poem) is a nonpareil literary sleight of mind. Talk about Deus Ex Machina! Her sense of humor is dry so some people just miss it entirely...they may be the kind of readers who need James Tate or someone like that. Yes, she is a slyboots. (I love the word slyboots and will do anything to pretend to have a reason to say it!) But I do love this book.

A GREEN LIGHT, MATTHEW ROHRER

It's nice but as soon as I started reading it I thought "Nice James Tate touches" and then I turned to the back of the book where James Tate is saying in a blurb "nice james tate touches" basically...with a bit of Salamun thrown in...and then there's Salamun blurbing also....there are some really nice poems in here....there is a sort of staginess in some of the poems, though, and I really didn't like the second section of the book "MK Ultra" where phrases are recycled throughout poems in a loose formalistic game...that whole section felt really forced and the poetry didn't work for me. He had a few little diamonds in here, short lyric pieces spinning and imparting a torque to the reader's mind....rather like funnier, higher-energy, more neurotic Creeley....if you like animals and anthropomorphic cutesy animals used as mascots of philosophical systems (shades of Tao Lin!) you will probably love this book....the thing that probably irked me most about the book is that it feels like an outsider pose of grace and naturalism but in every tiny nook and cranny you see glints of the staging...the frame of past "hipnesses" which is holding this all up....you get the uncanny sense that the poet knows this is the perfect blend of nonchalance and warmer feeling that the literary MOMENT seems to favor....en bref, it feels calculated....calculatedly "disarmed." That makes me nervous...I am an animal...I am always watching the brush around me...New York is some of the darkest brush around. I bet a good deal of people think the title is a Fitzgerald reference, but it's not. It's a line from a poem in here, "Ancient Chinese War," which may or may not have been written in response to Sun Tzu. At first I thought it was, but nah.

JANET GRAY, 100 FLOWERS

A great book of poetry very few people know about. I have no idea why the author left poetry (or it seems she has judging by all outward indices). She takes 100 O'Keefe flower paintings and turns them into lyric poetry....it would be interesting to study this book alongside Gluck's Pulitzer-winning volume (The Wild Iris) which also uses flowers as a departure for her poems...one of Gluck's books which I don't like that much. Gray's poems start with material that's already highly organic and often very erotic (the paintings) but takes it in sci-fi and philosophical directions...many of the poems seem to see the flowers as incarnations of appetites almost human in their ferocity and focus...this poetry book reads like a deliciously weird Theosophy text.; the poems seem to read objects in an almost noumenal way. I know that's impossible Kantianism! But she seems to do it somehow .Gluck's poems are going for the transcendental by meditating on flowers also, but her aim tends to be a human spiritual transcendence, so her book comes off as rather monastic. Gray's transcendence, on the other hand, is very, very inhuman...and very memorable. If you can find an old copy on ABE or elsewhere snatch it up! You won't regret it! Also, this book goes really well with My Bloody Valentine's Loveless album...try listening to it while reading this...a GREAT experience! Track 3 complements her writing particularly well! And Janet? Come back to us!! :-)

DEAR MILI, WILHELM GRIMM (illustrated by MAURICE SENDAK)

Ostensibly, a children's book, this would fall into that subgenre of writing where the work operates on two or more vastly different levels...where children come away with one sort of story and adults (or these same children grown up and returned to the book) come away with a completely different story. The one for children is a comforting story about the Lord looking out for his sheep. The one for adults is much darker, a story about how losing a child makes time stop permanently. The book is a poetic meditation on time, and is as strange and beautiful and paradoxical as St. Augustine's little disquisition on the same subject. It has an almost Biblical tone and majesty. This was a long-lost story by Wilhelm Grimm of the Brothers Grimm that was unknown until it turned up not too long ago, in a letter Grimm had sent to a child sometime in the 19th century. Sendak illustrated this quite masterfully; he clearly read the story in a perceant manner, and managed to create artworks with the subtlety to work at dual levels. It required a heartbreaking duplicity...to illustrate both the comforting child's bedtime story, and at the same time give us visual clues and signs that he read with full understanding and empathy the concealed mature story about what it is to lose a child.