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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
What's in a face, April 24, 2005
This review is from: The Face: A Novella in Verse (Hardcover)
David St. John's "The Face" is a grab-bag of voices and sunlit scenes, sprinkled with some gorgeous lyric and incantatory permutations; its purported narrative (it's described as a "novella in verse") about a man coming apart while his life is being filmed is attentuated enough not to hold all the movements and ideas of the poems together, but coherent enough to function as its own entertaining thread, and as a gloss on the less narrative poems.
St. John at his best-the lyrical, musical St. John-puts in more than an occasional appearance in this book: "Where had the river swung against / Its passage from one life into another?" (10); "Blood funnel, passion leaf, hollow pane, darkening / Nude high in the ripped moon. Here, hold the slender globe of / Your lantern in the mute, pulsing night." (53); "Where were you all that light ago, busy as a scarab in the dust, / Hard by the bed? Winters passed, forecasting new bad memories." (17) Acute longing and a subtle violence go hand in hand in the most intensified of these gems (for example, poems XXXVIII and XL). Wit is in season as well, in multiple plays on "assembling" and "dissembling" wind throughout the work-reference to semblance/mask/face/mirror and the complicated tango of identity -and in deceptively glib transformations which open onto knotty philosophical reserves: "The pane of circumstance / Broken always by one's own reflections." (4)
Tonally, the poems don't stray much from each other, in spite of widely differing formal strategies. This is one area in which the book suffers, as the neutral point of its register wobbles between jokey, self-deprecating intimacy and prosaic wistfulness. Many poems (especially the directly narrative) seem slack by comparison with the transcendent lyrics. At worst, the merely sentimental seizes center stage, as when the speaker describes the birth of his daughter: "toting along with her such innocence / As falls in whispers from the towers of cathedrals." (47) The tough-guy language and the anger, all the hotter, baser, darker emotions, somehow fail to convince as effectively as the regret, sorrow, and yearning.
With such a title and multiply-announced project, a book like this dwells unapologetically in the postmodern, and that is largely where it stays: looking at the face of surface from angle upon angle while feinting underneath. As such, "The Face" is suitable for a very broad audience; it's likely that anyone can find a praiseworthy poem in it, from film-lovers to fiction-readers to language poets to unreconstructed Romantics, but as a whole the book hangs heavy with overdone verse.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
To Love and Write in LA, April 25, 2005
This review is from: The Face: A Novella in Verse (Hardcover)
David St. John's newest work, The Face, a Novella in Verse, chronicles the fallout of a love affair in a loosely narrative manner, addressing issues of time, identity and longing in the process, and employing self-reflexivity as a tool to ward off the pitfall of preciousness. Written in the voice of an LA denizen who feels, he "had come, it seemed, to the end of my life," and whose life is in the process of being made into a movie, the 45 numbered poems take us through a wide range of styles, from the unabashedly romantic and sensual to the sardonic and angry.
The refractory and elusive nature of time and self are considered from many different angles in the course of the book, as in the 3rd poem which states "When it's over/It's already been over, everybody knows, long before it's finally over." This is a comment on relationships, but it contains the shifting, unsteady sense of temporal consciousness that marks a number of poems in the book. The poem goes on to echo Bob Dylan's "Don't think twice" toward the end, with the line "I don't mind any of it, not even those years I've wasted like silence." Time is addressed in a subtler way in the harrowing poem number 11 which begins "Shattered, shattered, shattered. There are so many ways/ To break the vessel, sometimes no single way will do," And goes on to shatter our notion of what is entailed by a vessel: "The vessel is only the shape to be recalled as what once one was..." The book contains many instances of such "assembling and dissembling," in the narrator's effort to pick up the pieces of self after the proverbial "break up."
Each poem is filled with questions that the narrator directs at himself, a friend or a lover, in the relentless interrogation of reality and facades that occupy the book. The pronouns are blurred and the "you" comes to stand for either a beloved or the divided self. Yet, even as the narrator braves visits to a hilarious and hair-raising "Edge World" where his "self pity/..sets even the dingoes howling" and continues to "push the day up the hill" in Sisyphean ardor, readers are whisked through European landscapes, introduced to Sharon Stone and are given the chance to ponder the significance of Dennis Hopper's trench coat. Set against the Hollywood backdrop, the Face puzzles the notions of self as mask and performance, reaching for, and attaining, a "sweet delight" in the process.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
The Fractured Eye, November 3, 2009
It's not hard to find the overriding theme of David St. John's The Face. Of course, one might say, obviously, the "novella in verse" is about faces, or more specifically the speaker's face, or even more specifically and metaphorically, the speaker's appearance and history/story. One might even continue on this thread and come to the conclusion that the work is about the masks we adopt (XXVII). But I believe the poems are more about the process of reflection, disintegration and understanding.
Throughout the work, there are references to mirrors and more importantly the broken shards of a mirror, as well as the ideas of shattering and disassembling. This is imperative to apprehend the mind set of the speaker. Here is a person who has suffered some trauma (does it really matter what?) and is merely trying to reassemble what has become undone ("assembling the disassembling"). Instances of this fracturing are also evident in the passages that speak about the movie being made out of the speaker's life. The creator (ironic), Infanta (telling) wishes to make the movie in reverse, that is show the speaker's life in an inverted sequence a la Merlin-esque.
Some of my favorite poems are XXV about the black rooms and even more XXX, the Edge World theme park idea. Overall, I think that David St. John has got something here, a cohesive and modern idea that translates well for the reader, as well as being a genuinely entertaining piece of literature (and I say literature because it is both poem and prose).
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