Amazon.com Review
Just when you think you are in the midst of a traditional, formal poem, Turner Cassity turns satin into sting. A native of Jackson, Mississippi--like writers Eudora Welty and Richard Wright--Cassity ranges the world in subject matter, from "Berlin to Baghdad" to "Texarkana," always exposing elements that are risky to divulge and often hilarious to contemplate. In "Why Fortune Is the Empress of the World," humanity is depicted "in overcrowded lifeboats" drawing lots. In "Domestic Symphony" Cassity resolves, "Say Heaven is this treehouse we have sinned in. / Our wine is ready. Pour, while I fix din-din." And in "Texarkana" the "East is, here as elsewhere, dead, / Dull, dry, and no doubt Red." Cassity seeks the destructive element and brings back wisdom, humor, and the sense that the foreign is enchantingly familiar.
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
From Kirkus Reviews
paper 0-8214-1222-1 Cassity adds over 40 new poems to selections from his previous seven volumes in this formidable collection, spanning some 30 years of versifying by a mostly unheralded master. This self-styled curmudgeon also includes some uncollected poems from a sequence based on the Flash Gordon comic strip and a series of poems on military lifeboth of which give a good indication of Cassitys unusual range in subject, as well as why hes probably been overlooked by most critics. An itinerant poet, surveying mankind from Curacao to Indonesia, he turns his gimlet eye on the ironies of colonialism (Rondo on the Rio Negro), the persistence of faith (The Mount of the Holy Cross), and the politics of architecture (Architecture 101''). As jaded as Naipaul, as funny as early Waugh, Cassity turns phrases upside down, and pieties inside out, in forms that are at once pithy and meticulous. He baits readers with his deliberately unfashionable statements (on commerce, labor, homelessness, meat-eating, and the novelist James Jones) and appeals to the antique notions of Folly, Fortune, and Time. For this cynic, aware that sin is our beginning, humor is a fit ending, and he provides it bitter and sweet. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
