A new book and 2 reprinted ones! "The Airborne House", like many of the poems, begins with a simile - "Ceiling fans whirl like helicopters/ as if this house is about to take off" and then (here with "And it does!") extends it or takes it literally. I liked "I carried my wife inside me -/ like a cable car I pulled her/ up the mountainside of our days" (start of "Carrying my wife"). However, not all the poems that follow this pattern succeed. "I was raised in a glove compartment" starts with an unlikely premise and doesn't develop it. "Map of India" began well with "If I stare at the country long enough/ I can prise it off the paper,/ lift it like a flap of skin.// Sometimes it's an advent calendar -/ each city has a window" but doesn't end well enough. "Ranjit Singh", "I thought my parents were married", and "All there is" didn't work for me either.
Short poems such as "Substance" and "The Lake" take an image as far it can stretch, then stop. I liked both of them. I liked "Story of a city" too. However I was puzzled by "Her Song" and the end of "The Drowning" ("I'd once walked upside down on the ceiling with it [the briefcase], dragged it along the Great Wall of China")
Throughout there are surprising phrases - e.g. "She created a hiding place/ in the empty supermarkets of the moon "(p.13).
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