Customer Reviews

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5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

This author helped me discover my love for poetry. I highly recommend buying this book, because a book like this is not just a one time read.

Szybist sounds some notes from other poets...W. Stevens (last poem pays direct homage), Roethke's and Gluck's flowers. But when she does it's with her own voice, her own concerns, which are spiritual and carnal. Great music in the poems, intelligent, engaged. One of the strongest collections I've found from the publishing glut that is National Poetry month...if you are looking to separate the wheat from the chaff of first and returning poets and their newest collections, this collection brings together all that (I at least) look for in new poet and collection.

Mary Szybist has written a beautiful and powerful first book of poetry. I just wish there were a second book available.

It is rare to have a poet so vividly, so unmistakeably, so symbolically go after some hard truths. Namely, what we long for in love, and how our lives of passion actually play out and what patterns we get trapped in. If one doesn't make early, naive mistakes - and we all do - then we are still left with relationships that don't always make us whole nor strong, independent people. Yet, there is longing, there are ideals...there is wondering about the machinations of heaven. Here is "Monologue to Be Spoken by an Archangel":

Snow! & snow of Our Lady!

Know the lamb

has dropped into sleep, numb,

stiff as a courtier, the lamb

(Hands indicating the motions of waves)

is not with you.

(A long time passes)

...and Our Lady grows

distressingly simple, caught

beneath stones, her white

bruises... Who has

(Indicating the eyes)

not been God's thief?

(disappears)

Our Lady! is dizzy,

ill, among sparrows-She

is stripped and salts herself.

When she cries, she cries

out to...

(Indicating absence)

...Who

has not been God's wife?

I found Szybist's style to be daringly abstract/symbolic, making the language lush and colorful and the messages behind the words emotionally powerful. Her commentary is more about the world than her own efforts and responsibilities, but in her stories we find a call for higher existences here on earth, for expectations that love can mean more than it ever has. A creative, revealing voice.

After reading the first lovely poem in this book, I was disappointed to find page after page of an indistinct, vaguely expressed voice. The overall tone is quiet and delicate and while there are moments when a gentle lyric almost shines, for the most part this is a poet who has yet to distinguish herself. It is clear that Syzbist is still under the sway of her influences -- early Jorie Graham, Emily Dickinson, Fanny Howe, Wallace Stevens. All great influences. However, rather than depend on the work of her teachers to lead her poems, this young poet needs to use her hard-earned study to find her own direction.