Black Dog Songs [Paperback]

Lisa Jarnot (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 2003

Poetry. Simply one of the most admired and imitated poets of her generation, Lisa Jarnot's third volume of poetry does what only Jarnot can do. Decidedly lyrical, always reliant on repetition and rhythm, what emergies in this book is a catalog of loves and laments: "Just the eldergrass and him, the fog, unpoliced and safe inside the train, the thoughts of rain, Apollo, and the sun..." As Stan Brackage has said of Jarnot, "[H]er words are never severed from the means that engendered them; and the consequent meanings are never detached from the meditative drama of each whole poem."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Mantra and echolalia, playground rhymes, Gertrude Stein-esque repetitions and Blakean mysticism sit uneasilyâ€"and inspiringlyâ€"beside deep lyric purpose and antiwar protest in this exuberant third full collection. Jarnot (Ring of Fire), whose biography of the charismatic California poet Robert Duncan will appear in 2005, splits the volume into four quasi-independent sequences. The first (not quite self-mockingly entitled "Early and Uncollected Poems") flourishes an array of comic moments: "Oh, Canada, you are melancholy today/ and so am I." "My Terrorist Notebook" comprises brief, often sarcastic political works, dedicated to (among others) Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush ("The chicken wing factory is lit up in flames"). A third sequence, "They," organizes a sort of fugue around the phrase "They loved," bringing in prose blocks and a deliberately frustrating sestina for cumulative elegiac effect, as if all that "they" loved would soon be lost. In the fourth and strongest sequence, "Black Dog Songs," quatrains and couplets based on Blake (and Edward Lear) strain to squeeze free of prose meaning: "the shift of stars in otter light,/ the twilight chicked limbs delight." Side by side with such incantations, however, quieter poems explore hopes and regrets: the subtle lyric called "Lisa Jarnot" surely deserves to end up in many anthologies.
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From the Publisher

Tom Raworth comments: 'Gertrude Blake pirouettes in a fun house of auditory mirrors: one reflects will be become wOZ; another a lamb post-suffrage; in a third The Blues remember hills. Through a mirage of defensible oases in Mother Goose light words swap parts and dance as Churchill's cloud wanders down attracted by the music.'

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Product Details

• Paperback: 55 pages
• Publisher: Flood Editions; 1st edition (October 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0971005990
• ISBN-13: 978-0971005990
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #295,753 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fan Club?, September 17, 2005

By 

Driver9 (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Black Dog Songs (Paperback)

Pretty much of anything Lisa Jarnot writes, I like. Her poetry is alive and sinewy and hits me in a very particular way. It takes me to a place I don't get to go very often. Please have a look and tell me if she doesn't do something like that for you too. My favorite poet? What a big category! I'm not sure I belong in that thicket. But she's great.

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Black Dog Songs, December 28, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Black Dog Songs (Paperback)

Black Dog Songs is Lisa Jarnot's third volume of poetry. Decidedly lyrical, these poems move through pastures and politics to the quick of thought. What emerges is a catalog of loves and laments: "Just the eldergrass and him, the fog, unpoliced and safe inside the train, the thoughts of rain, Apollo, and the sun . . ."

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars the sounds made by comprehensible words, April 1, 2006

By 

Jeremy P. Bushnell (imaginaryyear.com) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Black Dog Songs (Paperback)

The fake [?] political poems and fake [?] pastoral poems that constitute this book seem to qualify as what Richard Kostelanetz would call "text-sound" pieces: works "where the sounds made by comprehensible words create their own coherence apart from denotative meanings." Most of these poems ultimately seem to "cohere" more as lovely clattering vocable contraptions than as sense-making devices, but this could be a ruse... Delightful.