From Publishers Weekly
Greger ( And ) could rightly be called a decadent poet. Her latest collection swells with florid description and easy assonances, glorifying in the delights of the senses. While seeming to affirm the Western poetic and cultural tradition, Greger attacks its rational heart. The subjects of her poems--Mozart operas, Botticelli's Three Graces, narcissus flowers--are the vestments of aristocratic Europe, but her poetic issue is stream-of-consciousness. Greger can't pry herself away from any image that signifies a sophisticated taste, like Audubon's Birds of America in her poem "In the Elephant Folio." She devotes the entire poem (and the others in the collection) to a detached and meandering evocation of the thing described: "it glosses / over kidskin slippers, tortoiseshell combs, / at no loss for weeds to wedge / between the moneyed bank and its own / murky business, host to more/than its mirror countenanced." As a whole, these poems don't effectively challenge accepted notions of art, even though their dense and obsessive imagery can be viewed as representing ironically the decay of a Eurocentric cultural tradition.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
The 1002nd Night
Action
The Afterlife; In Memory Of Howard Moss
A Brief History Of Blasphemy For The Feast Of The Assumption
The Diamond Of Devotion
An English Suite
The English Tongue
Ever After
The Family Rilke
Foolscap
A Guide To The Gods
In The Elephant Folio
La Serenissima
The Little Mermaid Later
The Man Who Writes Dialogue For A Living
The Married State
Narcissus
On The Margins
The Opera Companion
The Penguin Jane Austen
Preface To The Collected Works
A Reader's Guide To English Furniture: The ....
Recent Events: The Fossil Record
The Report Of The Corrosion Committee
The Rome Of Keats
Sleeping Beauty
Snow White And Rose Red
St. Jerome In An Italian Landscape
St. Jerome On The Virgin's Profession
The Temperature House
To A Mockingbird
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®
Action
The Afterlife; In Memory Of Howard Moss
A Brief History Of Blasphemy For The Feast Of The Assumption
The Diamond Of Devotion
An English Suite
The English Tongue
Ever After
The Family Rilke
Foolscap
A Guide To The Gods
In The Elephant Folio
La Serenissima
The Little Mermaid Later
The Man Who Writes Dialogue For A Living
The Married State
Narcissus
On The Margins
The Opera Companion
The Penguin Jane Austen
Preface To The Collected Works
A Reader's Guide To English Furniture: The ....
Recent Events: The Fossil Record
The Report Of The Corrosion Committee
The Rome Of Keats
Sleeping Beauty
Snow White And Rose Red
St. Jerome In An Italian Landscape
St. Jerome On The Virgin's Profession
The Temperature House
To A Mockingbird
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®
