The End of Desire [Paperback]

Jill Bialosky (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 19, 1999

Jill Bialosky's first collection of poems is an exceptional one--moving, very accomplished, marked by an unflinching realism and a sharply observant eye combined with great technical skill. Childhood and adolescence shattered by a father's death and the struggles of a mother to raise her daughters are among its concerns. The poems have a dignity and magic that are quite distinctive.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In The End of Desire, autobiography coalesces into art. In her first collection, Jill Bialosky is intent on the before and after as she, her mother, and her sisters struggle with the death of her father. The opening sequence, "The House," is a delicate narrative of secrets and loss. In one poem, the two younger girls take turns burying each other under leaves in a game called father. Meanwhile, their mother resorts at first to men, later to alcohol and isolation. As her children are in the yard, building "fathers out of snow," she is abandoned indoors, increasingly unreal.

We left her alone for hours,
our skin raw,
holding white like warmth in our hands.
She was almost invisible
in the icy air.

As this woman retreats into sleep and drink, the narrator tries to console the youngest sister with stories: "secret gardens we believed were real, red barns, / horses that could make you cry, magic painted roads." Only occasionally does Bialosky falter, proffering the overt explanation rather than the objective correlative. In "Premonition," for instance, her mother doesn't hear her sister cry because "she was hard into her sleep / where alcohol formed / its impenetrable cloud." But many of her confessional lyrics are more subtle, particularly when the action extends beyond the confines of house and garden and the girls go past their "protective net / of stars and constellations" (even though romance never seems the haven the eldest had promised). The End of Desire is an often discomfiting record of the growth of the poet's mind, one in which grief never releases its grasp. --Siobhan Carson

From The New Yorker

"This graceful, mournful, and often exuberant first book combines the best aspects of confessional and lyric poetry...her book can be read as a gorgeous litany of 'reasons for surviving the night.'"

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Product Details

• Paperback: 88 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; First Edition edition (January 19, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679766065
• ISBN-13: 978-0679766063
• Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 0.3 x 8.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,475,865 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars Worthwhile., January 23, 2008

By 

Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal" (Lakewood, OH) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The End of Desire (Paperback)

Jill Bialosky, The End of Desire (Knopf, 2001)

I've been waiting for this book for a while. You see, back in autumn or thereabouts, I was planning out a review for a book (Stephen Tapscott's Another Body) that I was going to use to delineate the difference between a good poet and a great one. It was going along swimmingly until Tapscott got great in one section of the book, so I shelved those ideas until I found a book that would fit them. The End of Desire, as it turns out, is that book.

Every once in a while, a poet just doesn't know when to stop a poem. A poem is not a research paper, intro-paragraph-paragraph-paragraph-summary. We're supposed to come up with the summary (and, in some extreme cases, the paragraphs) on our own. One of the things that separates poetry from prose is that poetry should make the reader work for it. That's why I'm invariably disappointed in poems that end with couplets like "That's how I learned I had no power/to stop her nature from murdering beauty." (from "My Mother Was a Lover of Flowers"); is there anything being said there that we wouldn't be able to get from the poem, having read it? Would the cutting out of those two lines take anything away from the poem? You haven't read the whole thing-- I don't think so, anyway-- so I'll tell you the answer: no. That's what the poet has spent the last twenty-six lines showing us. There's a reason "show, don't tell" is such a chestnut in writing workshops. We writers are a lazy lot; why should we have to do the work when we can get the readers to do it for us?

I don't mean this to sound overly negative, though obviously I've just spent a paragraph harping on the book's biggest failing in a review that will be, at most, four paragraphs. The fact is that when Jill Bialosky isn't treating poems like term papers, she's quite good at this poetry business. The book opens with a ten-page piece called "Fathers in the Snow", and the first section of that piece is just about everything a fantastic poem should be.

"The game is called father.

My sister lies in the grass.

I take handfuls of leaves

we raked from the lawn

spilling them over her body

until she's buried--

her red jacket lost, completely.

Then it's my turn.

Afterwards, we pick the brittle pieces

from each other's hair."

There are a few minor nits to pick with it, I think, but they're more matters of opinion than anything else (though some writers, those who live by "the adverb is not your friend" as solidly as I used to, would beg to differ with me, I'm sure); the base of it is as solid as they come. Bialosky doesn't give too much away, but gives us enough to figure out what she's on about, even without reading the other nine sections of the poem.

It's a first book, and thus some of the stuff that drags it down is probably excusable through that old "lack of experience" gorilla that likes to wander around the room plucking the hats off the audience members. The good parts of this book, and there are many, make the bad parts worth bearing. ***

5.0 out of 5 stars This book is the essance of so many feelings women have!, July 22, 2001

By 

Crystal (Upper Michigan, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The End of Desire: Poems (Hardcover)

This book is wonderfully written. Her style of poetry is breath taking. When I read through this book I found pieces of myself in her words. She has been able to write more of what I feel then I have ever been able too. This is one of the best books I have ever read and would recomend it to anyone who feels a love for poetry.

5.0 out of 5 stars The End of Desire: Poems, September 11, 2000

By 

Annette Hollander (Englewood, NJ USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The End of Desire (Paperback)

With shocking simplicity Jill Bialosky presents intense moments of her life, illuminating the milestones of childhood, adolescence, sexuality and grief. See has a novelist's ability to make us want to read on, as well as the poet's ability to condense feeling. Her poems give the pleasure of sharing someone else's story while almost always touching our own lives. In addition, there is delight in the details of her images.