From Library Journal
Wakoski's story, as she tells it in her continuing sequence of autobiographical poems, is one of highly productive maladjustment. In this successor to The Emerald City of Las Vegas (LJ 8/95) and Jason the Sailor (LJ 8/93), the poet is disobliged both by the painful particulars of her own history and the currents of contemporary culture. Men have betrayed her, in particular the ex-husband who is now "a red square on the/ Aids [sic] Quilt"; the younger set, with their blue nails and freedoms, baffle her. Social criticism of the sort that characterized works such as The Collected Greed (1984) is less apparent here; this installment of her idiosyncratic "archaeology" has more to do with colors, the art of Edward Hopper, the writing of D.H. Lawrence or Adrienne Rich, and disappointment in love. Wakoski has always been disdainful of craft, but occasionally her quirky method can produce something as remarkable as "Night Blooming Jasmine," a personal retelling of the Persephone myth set in Berkeley, CA. Wakoski remains an interesting poet to watch, and her followers should be pleased with this volume. For larger collections.?Graham Christian, Andover-Harvard Theological Lib., Cambridge, MA
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
In the mid-1960's I lucked upon my first Diane Wakoski poems in Four Young Lady Poets. A few years later, 1968, I read Inside the Blood Factory, a killer early collection, and have been a fan of her work since, though less absorbed by her book-length metaphysical cycles than by collections built around content-laden poetic essays, expansive concretism, motorcycled eroticism and detailed letter poems with her voice's edgy intimate personalized topicality. Wakoski's interests are myriad; the territory of her work broad. In Argonaut Rose, poems are arranged into a mythic expanse, an "archeology of movies and books" subsectioned into imaginative clusters inspired by R.C. Seaton's translation of Apollonius Rhodius' Argonautica. Wakoski's earlier books, Medea the Sorceress (1991) and Jason the Sailor (1993), initiated her poetic exploration of the quest of the Argo for the winged and magical fleece. Absorbing classical origins tie the poem of Argonaut Rose to lengthy human bloodlines, but much of the poems' arc and power, as well as their variety and immediacy, is of the moment and the now. Lines such as "Aramis/or Chloe. Imagine/sleeping with the wearers/of these paintings? or watching them dress/in the morning?" (from "Old Embroidered Chinese Robes in the Ann Arbor Museum ") or "...I am the sailor's daughter, born in the Old West, a girl who dreamed of/riding silver-bridled horses and being at the yacht club with the rich..." (from "Red Bandanna ") demonstrate Wakoski's skillfulness at moving the allegorical and ancient into the personal present. One finds in the poems of Argonaut Rose Wakoski's characteristic estrangement-Californian affirmed to the Michigan midwestern landscape, classicist writing momentary notes to friends, conversationalist of the long-distance phone link, alchemic professor of the poem glimpsed "like Garbo going out for groceries/in her shades." Yet, there's warmth, appreciation and acceptance, as in the lines "...my own American eyes/light up/silver spaces," (from "the Barn ") or "...as I drive down my main street in this mid-western town/whose yellow glowing streetlights at night/give it the exactness of an Edward Hopper painting" (from "El Camino Real: For Jerry Rothenberg, who now lives in Southern California where I no longer live "), a pliable territorial anchor, perhaps more affirming than one expects to discover in Ms. Wakoski's work. And there are books, movies, friends and mentors, flowers and emeralds to propagate the germinal Greek myths-all sources of analogic relationship, cultural point-counterpoint and historical attention. Argonaut Rose is a strong and rewarding book by a notable and always inventive poet. -- From Independent Publisher
