1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Conduct Guide for the Imagintive Reader, July 15, 2005
This review is from: Curious Conduct (American Poets Continuum) (Paperback)
Curious Conduct is a great second book. It's much more experimental than Jeanne Beaumont's first book, Placebo Effects, which I also really enjoyed. Hers is a playful, intelligent voice, completely and quietly confident. She's a poet who makes a decision and sees it through. That makes Curious Conduct a difficult book to put down. Beaumont's world is fresh and sharp, imaginative, and dare I say fun? From "Corrected Proof":
The Broom will now kiss the bride.
Let science sweep in and enrapture the every day
as the blue blue dress wraps the planet.
Don't take nob for an answer.
Most theorems beg in on napkins...
Not surprisingly from one of the editor's of Poet's Grimm, there's a fairy tale quality here too: this is a world where rocks talk and bowls are exceedingly hungry. There's mischief here, and a bit of a twinkle in the "Metaphor Drawer" where "The shovel is ready/ The key turns in for the night" and "The Knife is desperate for friends".
Beaumont is a poet who engages with the world around her as much as with the language she is using:
Can nothing be done about the air?
A man asks, pretending to unnoose his tie.
I edit the sentence down to seven words.
I think he could lose the sportcoat.
I love a poet who is thinking on the page, and yet still engaged in the familiar. But don't let familiar fool you: there's more going on here than meets the eye.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wunderkammer, November 22, 2004
This review is from: Curious Conduct (American Poets Continuum) (Paperback)
CURIOUS CONDUCT is Jeanne Marie Beaumont's long-awaited second book, following her 1996 NAtional Poetry Series - winning volume, PLACEBO EFFECTS. As her titles indicate, Beaumont tracks the ways human behavior, like poetic content, shivers free of formal and codified conscious understanding but cannot elude true poetry. The hallmarks of Beaumont's writing are clear rhetoric, measured phrasing, and a subtle sound that's round in the mouth. Descriptive lists of her nominal topics and various approaches through form and experiment get a little wacky: Jon Benet Ramsey meets early American mourning folk art; Bonnard and Ionesco, Snoopy and Italo Calvino are included under this "big tent."
There's a sexy poem about a girl with a parasol:
"raw hand to the tusk, sliding up the varnished pole
great skirt of the thing flying open -- hoop
braid trim quivering there"
"Her Parasol," p. 15
and a scary terrorist poem that started out being about the sorts of accessories available at a dream five and dime ("of the last 5&10 / in America"), but ends:
" ...it's given
nothing away Now take your pocketbook home
hold it respectfully trembling in your hand
like one singled out by a terrorist."
"Accessory," p. 66
The poem is important, because it very quietly shines light on a loopy, feminine, working class, but very commercial "American Way of Life," even as it calmly associates an ars poetica (what is a "pocketbook" really), commerce, and sex (the woman is the purse).
CURIOUS CONDUCT begins "It was a dark and stormy night..." and ends with Joseph Cornell's star boxes. Thus the luminous details and observations are carefully arranged in Beaumont's wunderkammer of a book.
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