Customer Reviews

The End of Desire

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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. ***

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.

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.

"The End of Desire is chilling, deep down, riviting, and wide open. Jill Bialosky's account of an innocence ripened before its time. Enough to make one warm and cold at the same time. Crawl under the covers, because it is an experience of exposure, brave and raw. Left wide open for the vultures/ I too greedily lapped up her words. Licking at my own wounds, tasting salt, and laughing like tears. The wailing inside knocking against the ribs. The chest moving up and down, something caught in the throat. Once funny or innocent. Now wet, and warm trickling down the cheeks as if blood itself. A river. The insides turned out/ this is the beauty of Bialosky's mirror. Poetry reflecting like a pond. Light on top, yet deep down knowing there are dark and murky waters. Muck for between your toes, and slimy fronds to wrap strongly around your ankles. The unknown. AT one point Bialosky reveils, "Why do you worry so, when none of us is spared?" (p 72, The Goddess of Despair). Her poetry like the dirty dishes no one else bothered to notice. The embarrasing stain of adolescent mentruation. Like looking in the mirror, and realizing the falsity, the game. A fleeting glimpse of something shiny, happy. The taste of lemon taffy/ or a familiar cracked doll with faded paint smile. The memory of a warm palm against your face, and the billowy curtains which shimmer in the distance. Their thoughts linger there. Savoring the attic of the soul. A pause between breath as pain tills transformation. Life and death the swinging of an old screen door on the back porch of memory. Bravo!

Bialosky discusses with refreshing simplicity subjects that centuries of poets have anguished over. The terror of death, the sometimes unhappy progression of relationships and the despair of being childless are all subjects that have the danger of becoming cliche once in poem form. Bialosky's poems, however, are so personal and specific that even the age old lamenting of despair seems like a fresh subject. We, as readers, have made a quasi journey through the life of a woman who has struggled to understand the unpredictable nature of life.

Jill Bialosky's first book "The End of Desire" is fabulous. It is full of beautiful language and strong narrative poems. Many of the themes of this book--including family, death, sisterhood, daughterhood, childhood, parental love, romantic love, first love, and desire--are universal. The way they are written about, however, is anything but common. They're written about in the true language of poetry, carefully chosen words combined with images of childhood and nature. Although Bialosky's poetry seems to follow a strict layout thematically, her poetry has rich variety within each one. She manages to even address things that are extremely corrosive, such as rape and manipulation, without making her words sound sordid. Instead her tone is sad, but gentle and steady. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who likes poetry for its rich language and its delicate but honest treatment of tough issues.

Jill Bialosky's The End of Desire is a poignantly voiced journey. I am drawn to Bialosky's work for a number of reasons, the strongest being, I just can't seem to get over the way it follows me. It has a staying power-an echo effect. Perhaps it is the sensation of wanting to close one's eyes and sigh a lot. Bialosky's ability to shape and craft her tone so elegantly through her use of language is her most powerful tool. The End of Desire contains an almost narrative-like structure, in which Bialosky weaves an elegy for the past. One beautiful element of the book is how Bialosky's elegiac tone develops, complicates, heightens and transforms to a tone that is still elegiac and elegant, yet has developed an edge, perhaps a subtle sense of irony. By "Winter" (the last section of the book), Bialosky's voice is speaking from a somewhere else. In this place, her words seem to be glazed in a thick abrasive winter light that pales and grays all color, for which one simultaneously awaits for and is haunted by the night. We have gone from the place in which "House" speaks (the first section of the book), where a familiarity, a warmth and a sense of loss resonates, to "Winter" where we feel a coldness, a distance, and a sense of loss. Instead of being placed within the past, as we are in "House" (as well as are in "Reckless Heart" for awhile), in "Winter" we experience a re-envisioning of the past. Bialosky's work should be hung in one long open, empty stone hallway-a very hollow space, for her work echoes so beautifully.

I really enjoyed reading Bialosky's poetry. I read the book cover to cover then went back and re-read each poem, taking careful note of her use of language. My favorite is the last stanza in the poem "Skating Pond".

The highest compliment that I can pay Bialosky's book is that it made me want to write poetry. In fact, I had to stop several times in my reading and scribble down an idea or a response to her poems. The quiet force of Bialosky's words brought me to a place of childhood that I had forgotten, a moment "when looking back is bearable" in the fading yellow light of a late august evening. I did not feel excluded by Bialosky's use of personal experience in her poems, but rather intimately included in a life and invited to explore my own experience. "Ballet Lesson" and her poems that deal with the complex relationships between sisters particularly affected me, as a late beginner in dance and the oldest of three girls. When reading "Ballet Lesson," I hungered for the "one discipline" the speaker's body understands. If only my legs would stretch at my command or my arms open as gracefully as a fan (p.18). As a big sister, I wondered at the unfolding of sisterhood, the ferocity of the bond mixed with the sadness of unavoidable betrayals that Bialosky captures. In The End of Desire, sisters replace (some?) lost dreams, yet, at the same time turn upon one another with icy handfuls of snow and other weapons.

Bialosky's fine grasp of human relationships is supported by her skillful use of form and sound. Her poems are deftly musical, weaving subtle patterns that seem to weave themselves into more complex patterns under closer reading: "I can see you/twist one from the tree, /hold it to the sun" ("The Artist Misjudges Perfection," p.39). The "s" carries over into the alliterative pairing of "twist" and "tree" in the next line, while the "i" and "s" in "twist" and the "t" from "twist" and "tree" carries into the "it to." Bialosky also makes use of mid and end rhyme in her use of "see" and "tree" and "one" and "sun." It is this seemingly unconscious clarity and musical resonance that I would like to incorporate into my own work and teach my pen the discipline of the dancer in "Ballet Lesson:" listen for the count of poetry "beating in my heart, my mind" ("Ballet Lesson," p.17).

When you read Jill Bialosky's book, it reads like poetry, it's musical like poetry, it even "seems to be saying something, making a sort of revelation." But the absolutely refreshing characteristic about her work is it's way of saying without alienating "anyone." There was never a sense of disagreement, I never thought "Well, that's how it was for you." or "Can't say as I relate." This was never so. Instead, wonderfully enough Bialosky could say things about her past, she could paint images, seeming almost created at times, but always achieving the moment of the event, or the strength of her memories. What a wonderful new breed of poetry! One on hand, one could argue "But what is achieved?" I believe her poetry explores, painting a psychological landscape that provokes, because it isn't telling. Evokes emotion, because it doesn't force it out of us. Her poetry functions, most of the time, like a powerful dream. It asks us to do the interpreting and moral giving.