From Publishers Weekly
With its three serial poems and a longish Whitmanic invocation, Wronsky's (Again the Gemini Are in the Orchard) third collection has the intimate pace and feel of a group of chapbooks brought together for larger-scale publication. The opening long poem, "The Earth as Desdemona," comprises roughly half of the collection, and tracks its contemporized, multiplicitous subject from one January 24 to "almost Christmas." At its best, the diction and observations come together seamlessly, showing us our (gendered) vulnerabilities in living among each other: "Because you can't hide the thing./ You can't cover it with your hands./ Anybody walking by on the street/ could punch it, if they wanted to.// A fingernail could unleash it all,/ open you like a rice sack." Anecdotes about the desperate devices of neighbors and strangers, observations of local nature and "the very organization of language," and self-doubt are all clearly and movingly compressed into the poet's declarative shorthand. At the end, "Desdemona, now living in Skandia, Michigan," pens a chatty letter about flowers, summer, salads, wildlife. In the margin she notes "These/ are the limits of the figurative." "Little Dissertation on the Subject/Object" (part of "The World as Hieroglyph") opens on a woman modeling for a male painter, but soon inquires into the model's own paintings. If this and the incantatory Whitman poem aren't as successful as "Desdemona" (which has its own precious points as well), Wronsky's ambition and willingness to fail make even her more familiar tactics fresh. In "Sor Juana's Last Dream" the 17th century nun, silenced by her church, finds "hieroglyphs in the clouds." She stakes her claim as "the mother/ of syllables" and the "seer/ of all signs"--but only in privacy and depression: "I'll leave you my bundle: my nightmare," she concludes. "You may read it." (June)
Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
In this new collection from Wronsky (Again the Gemini Are in the Orchard), brightly lighted portraits of women's lives, past and present, make up a series of defining moments for those who "have to/try to learn to be, again." In the 39-page "The Earth as Desdemona," ordinary Chicano women, taking the form of animals and flowers, living in "urban dirt" of Southern California, reiterate the story of Desdemona's tragic sacrifice. "Now living in Skandia, Michigan," Desdemona becomes earth goddess, and Delores Faulkner, shot in the arm in a hospital, fuses with guardian "mother-angels." These fine-tuned poems, seeing the "world as hieroglyph" with cubist-like imagery (broken or jagged glass), compromise a collage of women, coping with loss of "promise" and "talent," while Whitman's poetry serves as a counter motif that illustrates the need to side of confining traditions. The final poem, "Sor Juana's Last Dream," pays tribute to Sor Juana, the 17th-century "Spanish Isis" ("I'm so tired/of the silence imposed by my confessor," she says), who keeps up a private journal that contrasts pagan deities with the severity of Christianity. Difficult and rewarding, like H.D.'s work, these smart, classy poems illuminate the painful journey women make to multiple roles and fully realized, and complex identities.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
