Customer Reviews

Cusp: Poems

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I read this book and found it to be like all the first books I've read of late: there were a few things to like, and many things to feel indifferent about. I took what I could get out of it--in inspiration and in caution--and will now move on and read the other new books out there. What continues to surprise me about the forums which surround the first books listed in Amazon is the amount of needlessly disdainful reviews which appear. The two long reviews which have appeared here for "Cusp" were clearly written by articulate, intelligent people--and yet after a while, given the heavy-handed dressing-down these reviews perform on the book, one begins to wonder about the reviewer and his or her state of mind. Why would anyone take a half-hour of his or her time writing a review that amounts to, at the least, a kind of road rage, and at worst a kind of hit-and-run? It's one thing to feel a great passion for poetry, to feel that every book should shine with ever-newer possibility and accomplishment, but it's another thing to focus on one book like "Cusp" and gleefully trash it. "Cusp" is part of the huge plurality of work that's being done in American poetry now; if you don't like it go on to something else.

This is a very average book of poems--little to excite or delight. The poem about the last Castrato reminded me of that film Faranelli--a good film, an okay poem. The dog and wolf stuff reminded me of James Dickey's famous poem about the stage between dog and wolf. The language in these poems is neither dazzling nor surprising, but one can sense that the poet is dedicated to the cause of poetry. The imitations function well as tributes, if not as full-developed poems.

I do wonder why the reviewer below would waste fifteen minutes writing a review of someone else's review. That to me seems ridiculous. The poet doesn't need anyone to defend her work. Any new book of poetry is a good thing. This book is fairly inoffensive if not unremarkable. I would think the poet would be delighted that people are reading her book and have any response to it at all. I wonder what will come next for this poet after she have moved beyond the "Cusp."

(Reading these other reviews, it occurs to me that "workshop poetry" is taken as a bad thing. When someone thinks the poetry is original, they write that it is "not workshop", when they think it stinks, it "reeks of workshop". Both have been used to described "Cusp". It's interesting how much the definition of what a "workshop poem" is varies...)

I wouldn't use the word "workshopped" to describe this first book because it would imply that I believe these poems were actually submitted to other people, including a seasoned and discriminating instructor, for review. I understand that at one point, sometime in her young life, Ms. Grotz was a student in the MFA program at Indiana University. I have to wonder if maybe these poems were the ones she kept taped up in a shoebox during that time, afraid to submit them lest anyone criticize them and question their sentimentality. That's what I get when I read these poems: no "workshop" about it.

There are a few things young poets need to stay away from: Vermeer, France, losing their virginity (or not), Villanelles, getting drunk, photographs of childhood, France and Vermeer. Grotz writes cliche poems.

I give the book two stars because she's young (and because I didn't see Vermeer make an appearance anywhere in this collection). I'm hoping she waits another ten years, actually lives a life original enough to write about (or just gives up and writes about someone else's life) and finds a way to share it all in such a way that isn't so darn mediocre.

Over the past few years, I've come to really respect the decisions of judges for the Bread Loaf Writer's Coference's Bakeless Poetry Prize, usually awarded to gutsy and original first collections--the vitality and urgency in the poems of previous winners like Sam Witt, Malinda Markham, and Mary Jo Bang helped reaffirm my previously lagging faith in the kinetic energy and forward motion of contemporary American poetry.

Naturally, I had been looking forward to reading CUSP--selected for the Bakeless by Yusef Komunyakaa, one of my all-time favorite poets. Well... where I'm from we always try to say something nice. The book has a beautiful cover. The poem by Bonnefoy, a good French poet, that Ms. Grotz uses for her epigraph, is beautiful and made me want to read more Bonnefoy instead of continuing on with the book in my lap. A couple of the poems in CUSP are decent--the poem "Cusp"'s not bad, though rather slight. And it's hard to deny the lyricism of "Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man," and the beautiful crescendo at the ending of "The Waves," both of which poems feel like they were written by a different poet, sommebody willing to refrain from posturing and let her guard down a bit, somebody with an innate respect for language, an ear for music, and an eye for imagery and narrative detail. I don't know why Mr. Komunyakaa chose this book.

Some of Grotz's blurbers seem similarly stumped and blurt out nonsense about the collection: the usually discerning critic Edward Hirsch claims the book "glows with a mysterious blue light!" Fellow blurber Carl Phillips, another brilliant poet, says something about how "Grotz situates us... in the now of ruin and abandon." That doesn't sound particularly pleasant... Another writer has decided to inform us that the poems are "strong like night trains"? Ahem. Maybe this is just what they call an apprentice volume, one that the poet later comes to regret having published. I'm prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt; it is a first book, after all: however, I feel compelled to warn inncocent readers away from this assortment of trite juvenilia.

The first poem begins with the gratuitous insertion of a French phrase, as if knowing a few words French provides Ms. Grotz with the requisite pedigree to spare her the criticism of readers who will soon realize they have wasted their good money. After the bon mot, the poet hastily takes on a fairly weepy journey through her Texas childhood, a childhood that apparently embarrasses her because she can't write honestly about Texas without a high-brow gratuitous reference to reassure her readers that she has evolved from her working class (?) Texas upbringing: Ms. Grotz writes of Lubbock (which I acknowledge happens to be my hometown and a source of real pride: in short, don't mess with Lubbock), "I have defined my landscape by its shapes, the family/car's four doors ajar in the driveway/like a cruel piece of farm machinery,/or my friends who listens to Mahler with long pieces of stiff paper/he folds up or down/to make a skyline for each symphony." Now how did that Mahler get in there? I'll be a good sport and not point out the pathetic fallacy of the cruel farm machinery and the grammatical incoherence of the whole sentence.

The next poem is about the poet's very ordinary loss of virginity in good old Lubbock. The Lubbock cliches of tornadoes and Buddy Holly are invoked, but then out of nowhere cines another grammatically incoherent namedrop: "Nights/a Thomas Hardy novel in all its naive countryside/could absolve me in a smoke all night coffee shop."

One whole poem later, while recounting a trip to Corpus Christi, Grotz feels "a jellyfish brush past my thighs/like a silk scarf floating through the waves." Now I've been stung by a jellyfish in my day, and there is nothing further from the actual experience of feeling a jellyfish underwater than the sensation of feeling a silk scarf. Conceptually, I see how she could have arrived at the false image. But it just doesn't ring true.

More examples of egregious writing: Grotz ends thepoem "Unknown" with "I wanted to flatten/against a wall like a moth./Two lips holding back a cry." Also, in a sudden flash of formalist urges, Grotz tries to pull off a villanelle, "Try" about the importance of loving a hostile world and comes up with the following forced rhymes and syntactically amateurish lines: "To love the world is what you try to do/after seeing the slow old man pursue/in the parking lot a cart that gathers speed." Maybe I'm being too picky, but I just finished reading a collection of masterful villanelles by 1st book poet Julie Kane and can't believe the villanelle draft that snuck its way into CUSP. "Gathers speed" in Grotz's villanelle rhymes all too prosaically with "fisted greed" (huh?) "need," "succeed," and "filigreed."

Later in the volune, Ms. Grotz gets tired of trying to write regional Texas poetry and takes us on a whirlwind tour of France, Italy, and her aesthetic and literary tastes. Apparently, she's fond of Blake, the violinist Joshua Bell, and being an American in Paris (how nouveau of her) which she reasserts in "Trying to Wake Up Francaise" by mentioning Peugeots, Proust, "kirs in tall glasses at the Cafe Dupon" and boulangeries. Is that French for bakery? In the same poem she asserts that her disinterest in watching American movies in France is analogous to PETER'S FORSAKING OF JESUS???

Perhaps Ms. Grotz is still in her very early twenties. In that case, maybe this book's pratfalls are forgivable and understandable. What's not understandable to me is how this book would be selected for a prestigious award by one of the most esteemed poets of our age and praised by a multitude of other reputable poets. Avoid this one. Go read some Yves Bonnefoy or Yusef Komunyakaa or Carl Phillips. Their poems may not glow in a mysterious blue light, but they most cetaintly provide the right ingredients for sating the perpetual hunger of the human soul, ingredients that are altogether absent from Grotz's tiresome boulangeries.

Honestly, a very disappointing book.

The promotional material on the back cover claims the collection "explores the peculiar territory of middleness--neither dark nor light, not quite familiar but not fully unknown." I would relabel this territory mediocrity, unfortunately an all-too common phenomenon in the increasingly conservative contemporary environment of feel-good poetry workshops where originality, risk, honesty, and daring are viewed as dangerous and suspect; many first books appear before the would-be writer has had the opportunity to realize that sycophantic imitation of one's mentors isn't art but merely an essential first step in a beginner's path to discover a voice.

These poems strike me as the worst kind of workshop poetry--slavishly imitative and derivative, afraid to push the boundaries of subject matter and language, overeager to resort to the crutches of preciousness, pretentiousness, and affected folksiness. This is a writer who tries very hard to impress and please, but all the reader feels are the contortions of Grotz's repeated failed efforts. Occasionally, the poems seem to genuinely be on the "cusp" of getting somewhere, but even the better ones are, at best, forgettable and inoffensive. This is a writer who has yet to master the most basic eloquence of expression.

There are four types of poems here, as an earlier reviewer has correctly intimated: The "I'm from Texas and my adolescence sucked" poems, the "I went to France and drank French beverages and wished I was a cultured European" poems, the "I listen to music and look at art and have epiphanies because of them" poems, and the "I've been in love and love has caused me pain but love isn't so bad after all" poems. The third category is more promising than the first two--Grotz's attempts at the ekphrastic form are competent, if generic and mildly obvious. The fourth category--the love poems--are actually ok: reading them, I almost believe that there is a body and a soul behind them, a mind and a voice: the best lines in the book occur in the unfortunately titled "Not This Raw Fluttering":

"I've hardly begun cataloguing/the leftover kisses on the dashboard:/west kiss, kiss of his elbow bent. climbable kiss,/kiss half kissed, lonely kiss,/holy kiss, kissless/kiss, kiss of the improbable, diamond kiss,/wandering kiss, kiss for the out-of-mind."

Nothing else in the book is that breathtaking or risky or distinctive. Instead, what we tend to be assaulted by are convoluted platitudes and laughable visual imagery. The following quotes speak for themselves. "To love the world is what you try to do,/describe the trash, the bombs, the fisted greed--when it does not love back, does not love you." (Huh?) "I open my eyes, feverish, near laughter,/The blur of lights far off--Venice--carnival/With men in top hats,/Women dressed as harlequins or/Divas or fat fuzzy bees." (Fat, fuzzy bees?) "Outside nameless cafes/crowded with canvas umbrellas, I sat holding/a cafe noir too bitter to drink." (When I was in France, I experienced enlightenment by holding and not drinking bitter cafes in cafes). "That moment when/the dog has wandered all day and is tired/and the wolf has just woken to roam." (Woken? To roam?) "Serious French cool cats slurp appreciations." (Slurp?) "She [my grandmother] wouldn't let me/slurp with a spoon." (Slurp?) "She will make of her whole body an ear." This is not exactly what I'd call accomplished verse. Good poetry is never, ever sloppy.

These poems might be promising enough in places to gain admittance into a writing program, even to get an MFA degree (all of the cool cats have one nowadays), but they're not worthy of a prestigious award or a serious audience.

Unlike some of the other reviewers here, I am not a poet, nor do I want to be a poet. I just appreciate poetry that speaks to me, that opens my eyes to myself and the world in some new way. The poems in CUSP do that for me. The cool, meditative tone throughout the book allowed me to leave the outside world for a while and find a place inside myself that's like the West Texas countryside that underlies many of the poems -- a place of melancholy barrenness that is saved by the small, surprising wildflowers that survive there. For instance, the linking of the word sinner with seeing clearly for the first time in "New Glasses" resonated with me and my childhood experiences and then took me somewhere deeper. When Grotz described the "stuttering applause / of a waterfall against clay-smelling steps" I caught a whiff of similar places that I have experienced and then followed her to a new place, asking myself, as she asks of her Madonna: "And will she be object, then garment, then art, be emptied?" The meaning of a story or a poem is a creative partnership between the writer and the reader, and I appreciate the way Grotz has held up her side of the deal. Too bad several of the other reviewers here chose, for their part, to be jealously destructive rather than creative, but it's their loss. Buy this lovely little book, and when you read it, take the time to let its familiar elements take you by the hand to more unfamiliar places of discovery.

One of the first things the reader will notice in this extraordinary first collection is that Ms. Grotz is not interested in neat, pithy "workshop" poems. The book opens with the speaker driving in a long, winding tunnel, unable to see either the entrance or exit. This is the emotional space Grotz is invested in: no clear way forward or back. Each one of these poems wades fully into a daring emotional urgency. And unlike many even very strong first collections, there are no disposable poems, nothing that reads like filler.

Several of the poems express a consciousness of the fleeting nature of the present moment. Grotz makes us aware of how we spend most of our lives on the cusp of the future and the past, in a moment that slips away the instant we reach out to lay our hands on it. And yet rather than bemoan the possibility of an actual "now", the speaker in these poems only seems to regret not being able to give us the world in all its beauty and tragedy. Grotz urgently layers her poems with these images. In the "The Waves", she transforms what would be (in the hands of a less talented writer) a gentle, mundane meditation into,"The sensation of falling, of falling through falling until it's floating,/dissipation , erosion/ The way from a car one watches the hills come forward, a slow swell/on the ribbon of road that stretches forever/Or how buildings collapse, as if to their knees, tilting slightly to the side, swallowed in smoke".

Even as Cusp exists in an ephemeral "now", it is equally oriented between places. In fact much of the book is set in two places that have never seemed further apart: France and Texas. I notice that another apparently college-educated reviewer who claims to be from Texas seems to find mention of anything French automatically "maudlin" and "snooty".

Nationalistic biases notwithstanding, another great strength of this collection lies in Grotz's instinct for beauty at a rodeo, a demolition derby or on a rain-slicked Parisian Boulevard. The voice in these poems finds itself between a "terrain [that] resists gathering you up" and this stunning, though humble, vision of Angers:"a spotless ghetto of thin, white buildings,/
no midnight, no field there, billboards/unfamiliar with the frenzy of circumflexes/and accent graves".

Cusp attempts to reconcile this sense of being lost as the book progresses, but the velocity of the poems rarely diminishes. In the end, Grotz finds "not an end so much as an acceptance". Yet there is absolutely no manufactured serenity here. Grotz fiercely loves Cusp's divided world as much as she trusts and respects the reader. If this is her first collection, we should look forward to what promises to be a vital body of work.

WOWZA! At least the cover is pretty, the margins are even, and none of the pages appear to be missing...

I agree with an earlier reviewer that first book writers should generally be cut some slack. However, in this case, the poems in this first collection are so sensationally sloppy, pretentious, conceited, and over-the-top sentimental that prospective readers should be forewarned.

I don't know the extent to which Ms. Grotz is connected either with Bread Loaf or the Bakeless judges, If she is a Bread Loaf employee, as a previous reviewer alleges, shame on her--she might as well be publishing with a vanity press; as far as her knowing the judge, surprise, surprise--that's the current poetry publishing world in a nutshell. However, nepotism hasn't precluded several outstanding first collections from being published every year. I'm stunned that any judge would select this collection, whether or not they were personally acquainted with its author. It's a disservice to a young writer to cast their book into the open seas before it's anywhere near ready.

Grotz, time and again, on the most basic level, makes the same mistakes my undergraduate (and, sadly, some of my graduate) creative writing students make in their rough drafts. There are occasional saving graces--this certainly isn't the poetry of Jewel or Jimmy Stewart, but of someone who has tried to read and write seriously for at least a few years--still, one doesn't have the same expectations from Jewel or Stewart that one does from a Bakeless-prize winning Houghton Mifflin collection blurbed by some of the more acclaimed poets of our time.

Reading Cusp, I felt I was reading a series of rough drafts by a writer who doesn't seem to have any regard for her readers. This book, frankly, gave me a migraine--you see glimmers of talent here and there, but almost every poem manages to self-destruct or, at best, stumble drunkenly for a few lines, so much so that I couldn't help but feel pity for the clearly ambitious poet's no-doubt well-intentioned exertions and contortions. I don't mean to come off as vicious, but it would be irresponsible of me not to be honest in my assessment. On the other hand, give this writer a few years. Many poets want nothing to do with their first book after they write a second and a third. Grotz is a writer-in-progress. With luck, whoever her trusted readers are will be honest and unsparing in their criticism and she'll learn to avoid the beginner's pitfalls that mar this ultimately forgettable collection.

Grotz's first collection is a rather impressive one. Yes it has its faults. It does sag in the middle, but the first section is wonderful and the final section is quite good. But the books also has its positive points. Grotz covers a wide range of styles and subjects in her poems. And though none stick out as a truly phenomenal poem, there are many good poems in the book. I look forward to seeing more of her work as she matures.

This is truly one of the worst books of poems I have read this year. With the exception of a handful of poems, this book was not ready for publication much less to win the Bakeless Prize. The faux intelligence, the vapid imitations, the lifeless and lackluster lines: a book in need of serious editing. I refuse to go on and on like others have done here. Basically, if Grotz hadn't studied with Komunyakaa (the judge of the contest), and if she hadn't been a Bread Loaf fixture for over five years, she would never have won this contest. Every famous poet in America can annoint this book, but it doesn't change the fact readers will not be duped. Grotz, a would-be Empress, is wearing no clothes.