Bunny [Paperback]

Selima Hill (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1852245077 | ISBN-13: 978-1852245078 | Publication Date: April 5, 2002

Musically as well as psychologically fugal.""--Booklist. ""Reminiscent of Sylvia Plath... Hill re-creates a nightmarish story.""--Library Journal

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Her works having been repeatedly short-listed for the United Kingdom's major poetry awards, Hill (A Little Book of Meat; Violets) finally won the Whitbread Prize for this work. These 72 mostly evocative free-verse poems move from wholesome images of pajamas, tartan rugs, and toothpaste to Dali-like images of frosty thighs primed with Vaseline and giant rabbits. Focusing on an adolescent girl pursued by a mysterious lodger, the book is a poetic variation on Lolita. The poems are written in a stream-of-consciousness style and at first seem childlike. But their tone grows angry and at times reminiscent of Sylvia Plath. Reading them is akin to visiting a fun house where the figures become menacingly alive. The imagery contributes to the surreal atmosphere, as does frequent reference to the color blue a technique that seems somewhat forced with approximately 20 poems mentioning actual and invented shades of that color. Yet while noting everything from headless chickens, to bras made from lobsters, to mirrors resembling flattened eyes, Hill re-creates a nightmarish story of sexual abuse and depression. Recommended for academic and public libraries. Diane Scharper, Towson Univ., Baltimore, MD
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

The 2001 Whitbread Poetry Book of the Year is a sequence about an early-teenage girl at the cusp of the 1950s-1960s. She is never called Bunny in the poems, and real bunnies appear in them only occasionally and symbolically. Most of the poems are in two-line, free-meter stanzas; few exceed or even fill one page. The psyche they expose is sexually aware, depressed, and imaginative. The girl lives with an aunt and an unrelated male lodger, about whom she unpleasantly fantasizes, or perhaps he really does attempt seduction. She often revels in the feel of clothes she likes or the smell of a boy's sweater but is more often blue, dangerously so. There is a fire, after which she is hospitalized. Later, disgusted by the lodger's admiring her curly hair, she burns it off. Trying to see through the poems' mysteries is irresistible, but the most to be discerned is that she is going through a phase. With its many repeated images, the sequence is musically as well as psychologically fugal. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 80 pages
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd (April 5, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1852245077
• ISBN-13: 978-1852245078
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,171,469 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Demands slow reading, but not for a good reason., December 28, 2004

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Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal" (Lakewood, OH) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Bunny (Paperback)

Selima Hill, Bunny (Bloodaxe Books, 2001)

Selima Hill's Bunny is a book that at first seemed custom-tailored for me: short poems (most running under ten lines) that stick close to the image, rather than wandering off into vagueness. Or so I thought. The vague does rear its ugly head here now and again, though not so much that it drags most poems down. Taken one at a time, there's a lot to like here. When collected into book form, however, one begins to realize that obsession, while a useful tool in the hands of many excellent poets, can be taken just a step too far. This is the second book of poetry I've come across (Debra Weinstein's Rodent Angel being the first) where whole chunks of verbiage from one poem are lifted verbatim into another. I don't suggest the poet is cannibalizing her own work here, by any means; I think it comes from having that particular phrase, sentence, whatever, being so insistent in the brain that it's forced out more than once. Which is all well and good, when you're publishing one of them and not the other in a magazine. When both show up in a book, though, it comes off sounding like a grating refrain in a popular song, or as if the book should have been one book-length poem rather than fifty or sixty shorter pieces. Either way, it grates somewhat.

That said, don't let it stop you from picking this up, as what's here is often stark, haunting. Just be prepared to take this book, despite its slimness, at the most leisurely of paces, so when you come to each poem, you're coming to it fresh. ** ½