From Publishers Weekly
Few poets can compete with Koethe's long lines for their prosy clarity or their oneiric intensity, sounding out "how intricate a tone of voice could be, or how evasive/ The direct approach to life could finally become." For Koethe, past obsessionsAlike the fantasy of disembodiment of Falling Water (1997)Aare always found lacking when matched against present desires: "Pining Away," an autobiographical reworking of the Narcissus myth, and the Dickinson nod "'I Heard a Fly Buzz...'" return insistently to epiphanic moments only to find them outrun: "I/ Think that I was wrong to see my body as a kind of place/ From which the soul, as entropy increases, migrates/ In an upward-moving spiral of completion." While his Proustian sense of how imagination affects memory lends poignancy to his meditations in this fifth collection, the poet's debt to Stevens often treads a thin line between flashy allusion and direct borrowing ("the intricate evasions warming up again"; "conditions of mere being"). And sometimes Koethe, a professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, understands too well the subtlety of thought, and the result, in long poems like "Mistral" and the title poem, is a lyric voice too self-consciously ambivalent, lapsing into disenchanted abstraction and dwelling too long in constructed ambiguities. Koethe is at his best when austere, nostalgic and exacting, when the emptiness that frustrates his nothing-if-not-self-critical speakers ripens into reconciliation with the "increasingly composite individual" we all occasionally fear ourselves to have become.
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From Kirkus Reviews
The fifth collection by this Univ. of Wisconsin (Milwaukee) philosophy professor is unabashedly intellectual and relentlessly abstract. Yet Koethe remains remarkably accessible once youre willing to commit to his unusual rhetoric. Forget about image and metaphor hereKoethes mostly long-line poems are really his way of doing philosophy, as if he accepts the limits posed by Wittgenstein (whom hes written a book about but never mentions in his verse) and must conduct these raid[s] on the inarticulate despite their value as truth statements. Theres also a self in the poems, a presence wracked by consciousness, pain, fear, and anger, but yet a self of the most impersonal sort, none of the mess you find in confessional belly achers. A Perspective Box reveals the poets youth in the California dessert, a landscape he takes as the emblem / of sheer consciousness. In these Proustian meditations on memory and the past, Koethe struggles with his place in literary time: after the Romantic agon and Modernist silence, he longs for something other than a poem, an artless form of meaning. After much melancholy and self- loathing, he pulls in his long lines for the hard-won consolations of What the Stars Meant, rhyming quatrains that find him surprised by contingent joy; and Fleeting Forms of Life, in which he tries to live in the here and now. Koethes demanding aesthetic (writing as a way of effacing people, of transforming them into ideas) is all essence and soul-baring. The result is some of the most profoundly satisfying verse of our time. --
Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
