Customer Reviews

Black Dog Songs

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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.

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 . . ."

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.

reading Lisa jarnot is like staring at tinfoil. lately what we let pass as poetry in america are small ironic and clever lyrics that hold little more substance than a witty e-mail. william stafford once said that reading modern poems was like eating grapes. well, reading jarnot and the hipster group she seems to belong to is like eating skittles. ok, i'm off to brush my teeth now.
good luck.