Customer Reviews

Ghost Girl (Poets, Penguin)

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The cover shows us a young girl blindfolded with her fingers poised over a planchette, some kind of Ouija board game with a pencil attached so that it writes too. I suppose the idea is to suggest that the poet brings us messages from another world as does the medium. Amy Gerstler has written a number of fine books but this is perhaps the best she's ever given us, partly for the reason that she seems so invested in exploration of this concept. Not only does the concept allow free rein to her trademark humor and irony, but she allows something genuinely chilling to creep into her work and thus, I disagree with the Publishers Weekly review printed above, I don't think that Gerstler has a Billy Collins problem at all, although I can see why the reviewer battened on this aspect of her cultural production. Not every poem, after all, is as successful as the best of them, but here she keeps her readers happily engorged in a very high average, and the poems are not just simple one trick ponies, she has earned our esteem with some quite long and complicated sorties towards what might be called her version of the "serial poem."

"Listen, Listen, Listen" is an extended meditation on the nature of sound, its manufacture and reception. Gerstler has always been a poet of exquisite verbal interplay, and now she parts some of the obfuscation to examine close-up the way her effects are born. In the same vein, "On Wanting to See Ghosts" reflects not only a cynicism and resistance to the mystic, but a tender vulnerability and a deep appreciation of human nature and our need to reach out and find more on the other side of death. Ectoplasm is comical, let's face it. "What's that stuff erupting from her mouth now? Wadded up wedding veil? Celestial drool? One of heaven's tiny geysers?" Many of Gerstler's poems have a dramatic edge to them, as though Browning were leaning in on that planchette too, whispering in her ear. She is half a novelist and the book is filled with stories told as vignettes, end-rhymes, enjambments. GHOST GIRL reflects the way metaphors of poetry and of femininity are deeply embedded into popular discourses of spiritualism.

And the implications are staggering. I love the way Gerstler hints that the practice of poetry is now being delimited by "professionalism" among poets what with the rise of MFA programs and the increasing competition among poets for a handful of positions "teaching poetry" in the AWP: "Only mediums who have been investigated and found conscientious and reliable," she writes wisely, "may advertise in these pages."

There will be few books in this decade with the eclat or the brilliance of GHOST GIRL. She's so good she doesn't even have to try and yet she does, again and again.

Amy Gerstler seems to be missing a left brain. Her half-baked meanderings are mere word play, not poetry in the true sense. If you get a buzz from words alone (and don't give a damn about a poem's meaning - or lack of it) skip Gerstler and read Sexton or Ashbery. They dazzle. It's hard to see Ghost Girl when she's wearing the Emperor's clothes.