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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Six Times Six,
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This review is from: The Dynamite Maker's Mistress (Paperback)
I cannot imagine a more daunting challenge than the one Nola Garrett has so successfully met in The Dynamite Maker's Mistress, her book of some two dozen sestinas. Having, in my own amateurish attempts at poetry, found myself forcing, say, an image into a form and ending up losing one or the other; I am awed by Garret's creative brilliance. She keeps it all together, subordinating neither the difficult sestina mechanics nor poetic content. I confess I began by concentrating on form. Mistake. Realizing I was losing the content, I began to focus on the imagery, rhythm, emotions, etc., in short, the poetry that is there, whatever the form. Yet form would not leave me alone. The repetition of line endings, like echoes returning in new contexts, were at my ear, but not intruding. Enhancing. I found some of the poems, among other things, sexy. The three sestinas of Hosea Three had me dusting off my Bible, gaining a new perspective on some Old Testament stories. I loved the erotic imagery in Gomer, followed by the tortured lament of Hosea, who, after extolling the pleasures of his fling with Gomer, begs to be filled "with Your right words" and claims to be "not a woman's, but God's man," I, for one, do not believe him. But I think the real masterstroke of Hosea Three is its presentation of the same Old Testament story from three different viewpoints. I read the three, especially Gomer and Hosea as deserved indictments of Yawweh, the jealous, lonely, capricious god. Likewise, in Kohl, a sympathetic Jezebel is painted for us, one I never met in my fundamentalist upbringing. Reminds us to question the Authority who sent those Israeli barbarians marauding through Canaan. Another of my favorites is The Pastor's Wife Considers Her 57th Birthday. I found it a wonderful encapsulation of the tension in managing two lives, doing one's duty while still recognizing the order of priorities. The yeast image is a great idea, carried through from petty gossip to fertility to love to consummation. Ms Garrett apprehends the human experience, reaches well beneath the surface, and gives us her lyrical take on life and literature. A book you will read and think about. And read again. And again.
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