Customer Reviews

The Hammered Dulcimer: poems by Lisa Williams (May Swenson Poetry Award Series)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

My only complaint is that Ms. Williams has not put out another book of poetry since this fine collection, the winner of the May Swenson Award for a first-timer. Other readers seem to view her work as trite over-workshopped craftsmanship; it is precisely the qualities that they deride that make Ms. Williams' work stand out from the rest attempting to practice their craft today. Rather than becoming self-absorbed with the thought of oneself as a "poet" while sinking headfirst into a miasma of hackneyed cliches, Ms. Williams explores the world of culture and ideas while at the same time offering exceptional style and imagery. I was a contemporary of Ms. Williams' at UVA, though as a literary critic and not as a writer -- and have heard her read several times. She is, without a doubt, one of the most impressive readers of poetry I have heard, perhaps only eclipsed by W.D. Snodgrass and Derek Walcott. Judge for yourself -- if you are a student or lover of poetry, it is definitely worth you time to read this collection, and it should be available at almost any major university library.

I remain startled by this collection of poems. The introduction by John Hollander, and the jacket blurb by Harold Bloom, compare the author's work to that of Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop. At moments, I also hear the presence of Emily Dickenson. Like them, Lisa Williams is a wildly inventive rhetorician--quirky, idiosyncratic, philosophical, and intense. She frequently attempts the sublime, but never embarrases herself, because she is a disciplined artist with a complex and mature vision. Within a line, she will modulate from the awesome to the amusing and back again. I would like to recommend two poems in particular, which represent the variety of this collection: the longer narrative "Description in Parts" and the strange and beautiful ballad, "Yellow Bird"--a moving homage to the poet John Clare.

The Hammered Dulcimer offers not only music and vision, but a formal luminosity and an utterly seductive intelligence. If there was once a gap between sensuality and thought, between image and idea, that wound has now been healed. I'd recommend this volume to anyone interested in the absolute best of what's being written by America's youngest generation of poets.

I don't know of any poet of the younger generation whose aims and voice are as distinctive as Lisa Williams'. A lot of poetry these days consists of naïve (or else ironic or heavily stylized and encrypted) self-expression, but Williams' best poems are often more like acts of the imagination in the seriously playful mode that Stevens perfected--they are poems "of the mind in the act of finding What will suffice," to use his phrase. Like Moore and Bishop, Williams pays intensely vivid and particularized homage to the things of the world in a voice that can be bracingly informal even when pushing the boundaries of currently accepted dictions and styles or when challenging the reader intellectually. At once enigmatic and evocative, speculative and lyrical, visionary and grounded, Williams' best poems manage to sound both carefully made and improvisatory. In an odd way they can sometimes seem akin to both formalist and "spoken word" currents in poetry today.

I'm glad to see on Amazon.com that Williams has a new book coming out in the spring. Among the ten or twelve new poems I've seen in magazines over the last few years have been several amazing meditations or imaginative riffs on subjects like sea creatures or the sun or cosmological phenomena, one or two very musical themes-and-variations (in the mode of Stevens' "Idea of Order at Key West," perhaps) and a handful of autobiographical poems--though even in those Williams never descends into the triviality or exhibitionism of confessional poetry.

Lisa Williams studied under the instruction of Rita Dove and with other now well-known poets. But this book lacks the spark that is necessary to make a book fly. All of the poems are flat and too self-indulged that it makes them difficult to get throught at times. Sure she writes in trimeter and tetrameter and that takes skill, but past skill a writer needs something unique to set him/her apart from the vast field of other writers. The fact is that Williams hasn't found herself. Like a classically trained painter who cannot break free from what has so been instilled in him/her through years of instruction, Williams The Hammered Dulcimer lacks staying power. The poems remain monotonous and difficult to relate to. The language is not as fresh as it could be and the reader can definitely see that this book was, in fact, "hammered out" and didn't come naturally to the poet. This woman is smart, but not genius and there is no genius in her poetry. She is good at her craft, but anyone with a MFA from UVA will probably have his/her craft down fairly well. But she doesn't have the madness it takes to be truly inspirational, not to mention that her poems use traditional meter and employ traditional turns, if they employ any kind of turn at all. In short, there is little meaning and beauty in her poetry. She may not like the "jewelled" lines of late Victorian prosody, yet she had proved that even a hundred years later lyrical cliches still haunt the contemporary poet.

*The Hammered Dulcimer* is proof that contemporary poets need not curb their desires to revel in the realm of ideas. In these poems the abstract becomes delightfully concrete--as, for example, when she shows the reader "the arrows of our fortune" pointing down "taut as a heron's foot" (in "The Direction of Shadow"). Lisa Williams' pitch, diction, and tone consistently soar to keep perfect pace with the ideas she explores. Meanwhile, her formal deftness--whether employing a subtle iambic line or ballad stanzas reminiscent of Scottish mystic Helen Adam--lends to each poem a music that is delightful to the ear. This is a collections I will turn to again and again--and I impatiently await Williams' next book.

Williams writes a "nice" line, her poems are tight and controlled - perhaps overly controlled. Unfortunately, I didn't find much here other than craftmanship. Her poems suffer from an all too common problem (these workshop days) of turning small speculations into universals, but lacking in detail, meat, heart, and experience. Williams may turn into a fine poet but if she doesn't get beyond the surface her work will remain glossy workshop ditties.