Customer Reviews

Bend, Don't Shatter: Poets on the Beginning of Desire

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Reviewed by Small Spiral Notebook:

Bend, Don't Shatter is a joyous and heart-breaking collection of poems that examines the complexities of being a gay or lesbian teenager. The voices in these poems are heady with the strength of their newfound feelings, stark in their fear and pain, and beautiful in their depiction of first loves. There are experiences of shame and hurt in these stories, yes, but there is also hope. In "Playing for Love," Amanda R. Evans turns the language of tennis into a reflection on both the emptiness and the always electrifying chance of love: "`love-love' / And still when I say it, the hollowness of that sound / comes back: love as zero, full of possibility, waiting to be filled."

No matter what your sexuality, there is no doubt you will hear the echoes of your own adolescence among these pages-who isn't confused about sex and desire as a teenager? For that matter, who has it all figured out as an adult? For many young people these poems will no doubt be a great comfort, a lifeline out of loneliness and isolation. So much of our young lives are spent struggling with the notion of what it means to be "normal." We want to fit in, but we want to be unique; we want to be "normal" but we know we are greater than that simple label. This book reminds us all of the important fact that there is no such thing-we are each of us great, complex, unique beings, and that is something to celebrate. To that end the collection captures a varied and vivid cacophony of queer voices and stories, defying stereotypes and honoring the terror and wonder of emerging sexuality. More than one poem makes reference to the butterfly as an appropriate symbol for this period of transformation from something unsure and unassuming into something fragile but miraculous. It is not an inappropriate symbol for this book, either-a slim volume that is full of unexpected power and beauty. It is a voice for the too-often voiceless, and we can only hope it inspires a new generation of gay and lesbian poets to, as Gerard Wozek puts it, "dream their voices into the world, / a little wounded, but on fire."

Great art - and in turn, great literature - often possesses a rare quality, the ability to speak on an innate level to its audience, to make the audience feel as if the artist is speaking about an unspoken, universal quality of our own lives. And although it is difficult to say that the poets and poems of Bend Don't Shatter, are attempting some universal or transcendental quality, what they do - and do admirably well - is speak directly and honestly to the book's audience, all with an empathetic understanding.

Indeed, the editors of this compilation admit that they wanted their book to speak to perhaps those who might be the most vulnerable - sexually confused teens and gay teens. And much like most compilations there are poems that are successful, managing to be tender, introspective and almost hauntingly beautiful, while there are other poems that seem to fall dreadfully on their own faces.

Poems such as Scott Hightower's "Spending the Night," Rane Arroyo's "My Mysterious Body" and Randall Mann's "Elegy for the Hurdler," are definitive highlights to the collection. A poem such as John G. de la Parra, Jr.'s "Courage!" is indicative of a series of poems throughout that tell the young reader to be brave - and most importantly that they should always be themselves.

A poem such as Mick Coccia's "We Are Not Vegetarians," is problematic because it's so enigmatically minimalist that it's difficult to obtain much of a reason as to why it was placed within the collection. Ideally, the attempt is to cover a multitude of emotions and thought on the experience of being young and gay or young and sexually confused, to prove (paraphrasing one of the poets in the collection) that there is more than one [...] truth.

And that is what Bend Don't Shatter manages to do so amazingly well - but the reader should be aware that the book is aimed towards younger readers.

This book is full to the brim with beautiful poems that address the confusion of youth. I found it inspiring to read. Any young person would find it hopeful and may be driven to write about their own feeling because of it. I think this a great book for highschool libraries where young people can find it and know that they are not alone.

T. Cole Rachel and Rita D. Costello (eds.) Bend, Don't Shatter: Poets on the Beginning of Desire (Red Rattle Press/Soft Skull Press, 2004)

The most amazing thing about this collection is the folks they got to blurb it. The back cover contains high praise from poet Mark Doty ("These poems are for every young person who feels alone and full of longing...") and Academy of American Poets Associate Director Charles Flowers ("These poems find their power in a language forged by desire and survival..."). The introduction, by David Groff, promises that "The poems in Bend, Don't Shatter will pluck chords in you, chords so complex and resonant that you feel them in your spine. You'll hear truths so exact you can't explain them." I hear stuff like this and I expect to be blown away by what's between these covers.

Honestly, I should have known better. The narrower the theme for an anthology, the more inconsistent the poetry therein is liable to be. An anthology of love poems puts you on pretty solid ground. An anthology of teen love poems (putting aside for the moment that the ratio of good teen love poems to bad teen love poems is smaller, perhaps, than any ratio of good to bad in the whole realm of art) is going to cause that ground to sift under you. When you constrict it to gay teen love poems, you're pretty much ensuring you're going to pull the rug out from under yourself. What do you think's going to happen when you confine it to poets writing about the inception of gay teen love?

The reason for this is simple: the ratio of good poetry to bad poetry in the world is already so small that the restrictions are bound to find you swimming in mountains of bad poetry, while you may not find even a single piece that's actually poetic. From that standpoint, Bend, Don't Shatter is actually a resounding success. There are, in fact, whole poems in this anthology that deserve, that demand, to be read. Fine pieces of work that truly understand what poetry is all about. They get "show, don't tell" right. They draw the picture and let the reader figure out the story.

Unfortunately, most of the collection does not. As should be expected, you've got your fill of message poetry that would be exactly the same written out in prose. You have a couple of astonishingly bad formal pieces scattered throughout for good measure (the rest, of course, being free verse). You have some pieces that show real potential, where a line here or there is truly excellent, but the rest needs serious work. In one particular case in this anthology, you have a piece that starts off brilliant and, before your eyes, degenerates not only into message poetry, but the kind of horrible message poetry that could only sound good read from a soapbox on a streetcorner by some guy wearing a backwards collar, being laughed at by passersby.

Interestingly, the anthology gets better as it goes on; I've no idea if the editors intended this effect, but the closer you get to the back of the book, in general, the better the stuff you're going to find. (One is tempted to counsel the reader to read it backwards.) In particular, Scott Hightower's "Cruising a Hungry World" is fantastic, a really good formal poem in an age when really good formal poems are few and far between (it has not escaped this author's notice that one of the best formal poets extant today, Marilyn Hacker, is both gay and infatuated with the sestina, and that Hacker's influence is worn thick on Hightower; that said, there are far worse influences to have, and most poets seem to have them).

By all means, give this a look, as long as you don't mind wading through swine to find a few pearls. **