Customer Reviews

Deer Table Legs: Poems (Contemporary Poetry Series)

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I have read and re-read this book several times and I cannot find the beauty others seem to have discovered. The work represented in Deer Table Legs is not poetry at all. Where's the use of deep metaphor? The hightened sense of language? Basic common sense? I am not convinced with the author's use of the child-like perspective. Her voice and imagination remain at the infantile level and have no other value than spouting gibberish thought patterns. This book is a great disappointment and not worth the time and money I spent on it.

"Deer Table Legs" breaks poetry open in the service of consciousness. Cleary this poet has an original vision, without alliegances to the pseudo-avant-garde. Read this book.

I like to recommend this book to all the people who enjoy reading an extraordinary piece of art. The author has well showed her superb ability to revive memories and images that would leave a unforgettable foot print on our minds. With her precise and gentle wording She can take you with her along a beautiful journey that is colorful & clear and full of beautiful images that can touch every heart and soul. She has abitlity to do so only because she looks into her kind and forgiving heart and pure soul to write these beautiful poems. I loved it all from jerkfish, lying mango to county and taos, it describes tenderness and love,love.... DON'T miss out on this beautiful book !

I do not usually read poetry. If I do, it is classical Persian. When I got a copy of "Deer Table Legs" I was reluctant to even open it, fearing I would put it down after the first two sentences. I was wrong. I was struck by Zandvakili's wildly imaginative style. The twists and turns are often unexpected and seeminly disconnected. But each poem as a whole makes absolute sense, in some strange and wonderful way. Brilliant! Jahanshah Javid

What passes for poetry today is taxing to the true spirit of the tradition. Deer Table Legs and the poems therein are the perfect example of what Harold Bloom warns us about in his essay in The Best of the Best American Poetry: "the barbarians are about us and we must retain the heights." No music in the lines, inattention to traditional meters, lack of vision, and ill-afforded ennui are the faults found in this book. We must demand higher standards if poetry is to survive into the next century.

Katayoon Zandvakili's work reflects a refreshing originality, courage, and delicacy that makes her poetry worth reading over and over. It is poetry that is meant to be read aloud, for in the startingly arresting images like those of her title poem "deer table legs" your find something that is new and puzzling, but when you let it sink into you, it has a remarkable precision and wisdom. Her work suggests the power and effort of a poet who reaches somewhere deep inside her to refine and polish each line and the images contained in them. They reflect a passion for the curiously unexplored moments and objects of life, while also reflecting an obsession with the language in which to say them. Her poetry demands your attention, not because it is abstract or difficult, but rather because like a spider who has fastidiously woven a web in the corner of your kitchen overnight, you cannot afford to overlook her delicate lines. They come at you with their precise and divine sharpness, like the eye of a needle that is either successfully threaded or not. This is poetry that requires your full attention because it conjures so much that if you blink, you will miss its beauty and refinement. This is a poet who deserves all the accolades she has received.

Not since du Bellay has the pensive exile been so richly characterized. Ms. Zandvakili's poetry recalls a time when the profoundly moved reader would respond with a poem of his own or perhaps an "explication du texte".

Katayoon Zandvakili's Deer Table Legs is the impressive debut of a singular voice. The poems contain beautiful images, surprisingly juxtaposed, that chart the complex journey of a love affair which exists both in the concrete physical world and the fragile world of spiritual connection. This tension between the physical and the spiritual finds an analog in the language and references as well. Poems soar from the mythic and historical to Sam Shepard to convenience stores and car-trips, describing the heights and depths of an intense love in language that discovers beauty and clarity in everyday diction. Zandvakili is a poet of the personal only in so much as she finds the universal in details. She is an explorer. Reading through this challenging and moving book, I am reminded of what Donald Barthelme said in response to a criticism that his work was too obscure: "Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, rather because it wishes to be art. However much the writer might long to be straight-forward, these virtues are no longer available to him. He discovers that in being simple, honest, straight-forward, nothing much happens." Very much happens in Deer Table Legs, and this book rewards a diligent reader who is open to discovery. Above all the book is a true one, true in impulse and execution, the only necessary criterion for literature. Zandvakili has delivered something exciting and extraordinary, and Deer Table Legs deserves every award and accolade it has received.

The writer conveys, through a clever combination of phrases, a sense of the state of mind of her characters that, even if fictional, seem so real and true. The characters project thoughts and ideas so emotively that I feel I know them intimately, especially through successive rereadings. I feel the need to know them even more intimately -- perhaps I have already fallen in love with one or more of the characters as I have this book close to me at all times, in my portfolio, next to Emily Dickinson.

The notion that poetry is like bread and wine for our daily table, for the spiritualization of both everyday and every day: Ms. Zandvakili's lines are arguments for this. Finely embroidered with the exquisite and the concrete. A personal voice, to be sure, and lyrical, but universalist and transpersonal in vision. Perhaps because of this I was reminded of the pleasure I took in my first encounter with Rilke in excellent translation.