| Format | Frequency |
| 2 line stanzas | 6 |
| 3 line stanzas | 3 |
| 4 line stanzas | 3 |
| 5 line stanzas | 1 |
| 6 line stanzas | 1 |
| 9 line stanzas | 1 |
| 10 line stanzas | 1 |
| 11 line stanzas | 1 |
| Misc stanzas | 36 |
Her shorter poems aren't the least substantial - I like "Taxi Driver, September 2001", "Autobiography without Pronouns", "Anthurium", and "Re: Venus". I like "The Man Whose Left Hand Thought it was a Chicken" too. The narrators can be plucky, swearing defiantly against fate, drunk again. Elsewhen poems can be puzzling. "Four Poems For" is a struggle for me. Here's part of "Fell" where the meaning's conventional enough, but the internal spaces are strange (I can't believe they represent the jogger's breath patterns, for example)
|
and be the last thing moving for the blunt sheep shear of lark's wing world made over You weighed down with neither coin nor key pay dues in body-salts |
Her endings can be quite traditional though. Here's how "Babysitter" ends - "Down through a decade's empty rooms/ your mother's disappointment/ falls in crisp pleats". And "Nine Miles Stationary", about a traffic jam, surprises us at the end with "Lizzie,/ take it as the crow flies, I may have to bury you/ out here, though being on time would still have been/ too late. Lilies, exhausted, on the passenger seat;/ their scent given up on a wreath of my own heat". Similes are understated - "And he's all for conversation./ Though my tongue's a husband in a dress-shop, he does not mind" ("In the one"). All in all, few duds.
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