From Publishers Weekly
From the "irradiated mirrors" and "smooth unstartled mannequins" of its long title sequence to an impressive poem about art historians' radiography, Sheck's fourth collection presents intricate verbal surfaces, with pointers to elaborate philosophical depths. Unfortunately the surfaces, and the depths, most often seem borrowed from another contemporary poet, Jorie Graham. "How silent the unbecoming is, how silent the unraveling," Sheck writes in her title sequence, in phrases sure to recall Graham's The End of Beauty. Other poems seem to pick up, or try to rewrite, Graham's best-known single poems (one about Pascal's coat, another about Orpheus and Eurydice, another about a subway). Her influence shows in dramatic description of light and shadow ("bright/ chaos of atomized instances"), in rhetorical questions and portmanteau words ("What inside me will finance the trepass, the unprisoning?"), in her fleets of abstract nouns ("Immobilism leaned down tall in her black dress"), in allusions to the language of film, even in titles borrowed from Tudor poetry: matching Graham's "Of Forced Sights and Trusty Ferefulness," Sheck has "To Tell Him Tydings How the Wind Was Went." Sheck (The Willow Grove) is hardly the only poet to mimic Graham's influential manner her sawtooth-shaped stanzas, her Pascalian wagers, her rapt stutters and showstopping queries. "Doubt is a beautiful garment," Sheck declares, "if only I could wear it,/ all silk and ashes, on my skin." Her new verse shows undoubted ambition and charm; it may also give many readers the feeling that she's wearing someone else's clothes.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
"Abeyance of stars, blacknesses of night, the undisfigured place/ between each footfall/ my flashlight marks." Even when describing the everyday world, Sheck whose recent collection, The Willow Grove, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize paints a picture of an ethereal, mysterious place. Sheck writes cityscapes, historical poems, and paeans to nature; some of her titles include "Wall-Writing," "Traces, "Foal," "The Cave," "Seaweed," and "Escape Velocity." However, it is really memory she archives in these poems: "Think hands, think mouth, think eyes. Those pieces floating/ in their stream of thought. That they might cohere and be a life." These lines from "So Fast Away" could serve as Sheck's ars poetica. Sheck is the first poet that this reviewer has encountered who effortlessly captures the cyberworld both its hold on us and its otherworldly qualities: "Now the ghost-bodies are crossing and re-crossing the screen,/ unmoored from this lullaby called solid world,/ called touch." Occasionally, a simile falters ("The stars like microchips"), but more often than not Sheck succeeds in leading us into a dream world composed of scraps and shards of memory. We follow her even when she leads us into dark places we might not otherwise choose to visit. In fact, so artfully does she weave grief, loss, and chaos into her shattered cityscapes that it is hard to remind oneself that these poems were written before this year's terrorist attacks. A haunting, beautiful collection that is highly recommended. Doris Lynch, Monroe Cty. P.L., Bloomington, IN
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
