Let's start with "A Part of Me is Gone". To paraphrase - the loss of a parent can be likened to losing one's identical twin. The sound bites are "Death, it seems, the fiercest/ raider of identity,/ for the survivor too - / self's theft ... I'm the damaged bit that's left".
- The first stanza's lines have an 8/4/4/4/4/4 syllable count, the 3rd and 6th lines end-rhyming "one" with "run".
- The second stanza's count in 6/5/5/6/7/8. The 3rd and 6th lines still rhyme - "theft" with "bereft".
- The third and final stanza only has 5 lines of irregular length, the last ending in "left".
There's a sense of the person unravelling, composure dissolving. It's the book's most organised piece. I like all I've pointed out so far about the poem. The rest of the poem I'm less sure about.
With some poets I feel I know what they're trying to achieve. With this poet I have more trouble. Even when I like a poem, there are parts that seem, to me, to defeat (or at least dilute) the purpose. A clue perhaps is in the Acknowledgements where not only are magazines (including Prairie Schooner) mentioned, but the editors too. Add in collaborators, judges, those who are quoted on the covers (Clive James, Roddy Lumsden, Glyn Maxwell, JM Coetzee, Penelope Shuttle) and the dedicatees (7 names - there's even an i.m. Michael Donaghy poem) and you have quite an inhabited book.
Poets are sometimes told to see significance in the apparently small and trivial. Some poems here do the opposite, name-dropping big scientific concepts (though given that one piece was written for a musical event called "Music in the space time continuum" it was perhaps doomed from the start). I don't get "Why?". It's a list of stock answers to the title's question - "Because I say so", etc. The final two lines are "Lambda (at present unknown)./ Lambda at present unknown.". This lambda is, I presume, the cosmological constant determining whether the universe will expand or crunch. All the same, I don't really get those two lines.
I'm allergic to pieces like "The Occupation" - a travelogue with a twist of concern at the end. I've doubts about "Japan Notebook, December 2004" for similar reasons. In contrast, "Doppelgänger" tries too hard, with centred sections and too many notes. I've doubts about her noun-only pieces, and pieces with scattered, artsy layouts.
I like much of her content and imagery though - e.g. "Flip the pillows/ on the griddle of the bed/ seeking out the only sweet spot left" (p.67). I like the start of "In Which, the switch". "In Which, More Jazz" shows that she can play with words - "You can drown in the black lakes of piano lids./ I know. Grand Rapids, down in one./ Dying Falls, Niagara-style, a barrel of laughs until/ it's your turn, luv" - sliding effectively from one phrase into the next.
I think I'd prefer her raw material to the way she's developed it into poems. "Trade Matters" could easily be prose, so it might as well be. "Jerusalem Stone" has a partial (.bcb.ceeb) rhyme-scheme which doesn't help the content. Making the material of "Gaza" into a haiku doesn't help. I'd have lists of little prose insights, epigrams, witticisms, journal entries, observations etc, rather than make each one into a "poem". But so many people like her work that I realise this my problem, not hers.
The book ends simply and well with "Wake" - "how we leave/ a white road on the sea/ for a while".
Other reviews
- Michael King (What for me were the most enjoyable features of this collection are matters of poetic craft, rather than the subject matter. ... Of particular interest to me were the seven double-page spreads which each presented four poem fragments or sections in which the poet examines a momentary thought, or impression, without in any way building them into a sustained or completed work. Yet each idea is strong and pointed, almost the way a throw-away line in conversation works far better than a fully coherent discourse.)
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