Customer Reviews

The Art of Subtraction: New and Selected Poems

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The best poem in the whole collection is a long(ish) elegaic poem called "A Conversation in Oxford" and is about the ideas of Isaiah Berlin. The poem cleverly and touchingly summarizes the essence of Isaiah Berlin's long life of thought on history and mind.

A poem entitled "Summer People" -- about beautiful and rich tennis players on vacation -- was good social commentary, though perhaps not as sophisticated nor as witty as Dana Gioia's poem on the same subject (rich idle people in their tennis whites) entitled "At the Waterfront Cafe."

A poem about a blind man tapping with his white cane (a symbol for the poet's intution) -- entitled "White Cane"-- seems to demonstrate the poet's own methods of composition while confessing a "lack of (poetic or philosophic) vision."

Because I am half Italian and know Parini to be fully Italian, I found the poem "Family Reunion" and his reference to "spaghetti junction" in it extremely funny and the entire poem sadly true to adult experience.

While critics, I think, have overstated the power to be found in Parini's political poetry, I found "State of the Union" to be the one and only political poem that had a clear and passionate point of view; it is a joy to read (as a left-leaning liberal).

I didn't think it was possible to find poetry in power stations or in sewerage, but Jay Parini found a way to do so, and I experienced many an enjoyable moment reading his poems.

I read this collection backwards -- from his latest poems back to his earliest poems at the front of the volume. Following this method, I was able to trace Parini's unmistakeable growth as a poet. The later poems are denser, more sophisticated, tightly condensed whereas the earlier poems, by contrast, seem almost "bald" and more innocent, simpler in their "subtractions."