Breaking a seven-year silence, the prize-winning poet writes of the stark isolation of confronting love's aftermath, its losses, and its undeniable betrayals.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
"This is about what got left behind./ A family. A landscapeAblack sand, white water, green stone./ ....Then, more gradually, the loss of other things./ Pride. Sleep. Health. Weight. Hair. Bone. Time. Heart. Voice." Prolific poet and prose writer Morgan's sixth collection remains fixated on that knottiest of second-wave feminist conundrumsAhow one's personal tragedies and the much larger-scale conflicts of the world can share space in a single consciousness. That question produces some torturous shifts, as in the title poem: "How tedious this mourning over a lover is, how trite! Better/ to dwell on my country's shift to the Right, better to fight/ for houseless heads, better to heal the body, attempt full-peal/ to write." Elsewhere the poet reads from an encyclopedia, only to teases herself narcissistically with ideas of suicide. Again and again, a reader will look for some redeeming ironyAonly to find pathetic fallacy ("candytuft nodding in coy denial of problems you/ would not discuss") or jokes that don't quite come off: "Bucolic landscapes had all but put me six feet/ deep down under..." In poems very short and moderately long, couplets and sizable stanzas, lines end-rhymed and internally rhymed, one finds evidence of serious craft ("Glorious leader, bemedaled and embalmed,/ you lie at last a relic, marble-biered in state"), near obsessional soundplay and the attempt to fit empathic straight-talk into some pretty ornate structures. For some readers, dexterous discussion of oppression, illness, survival and heartbreak will be enough. But too often, Morgan's reflections cross the line from artifice and honesty to glibness and self-satisfaction. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Library Journal
Morgan begins with a quote: Beatrice's cocky assertion, in Much Ado About Nothing, that she will never run mad, not until "a hot January." But while level-headed Beatrice is gradually seduced against her will, Morgan is a poet who courts passion from the start. This volumeAher sixthAcelebrates a recovery from a seven-year silence brought about by heartbreak. The introductory poem, "Forward," addresses the reader directly and would make make Baudelaire blush: "Possess me then/ as no else has, could or even can./ Spread me to feel my pulse insist/ `I am,' `I am,' iambic at your touch." This excerpt embodies Morgan's best and worst poetic traits: the ability to craft a rhythmic, driving line as well as an aggressive sentimentality and a weakness for puns. The title poem is a descent through madness, mixing the remnants of a love affair with snippets of literary quotes: "oh yes, the two hot/ Januaries, when much learning made me mad. Perhaps I never/ wrote nor woman never loved. Still once I sang (harmonious/ madness) how we were two women, how women were different, how women knew how to love. But that was in another country/ and besides, the wench I was is dead." Readers are expected to take this ride, even if they don't believe that lesbians are exempt from bad relationships. The strongest poems are toward the end: "Chords," a natural yet formal love sonnet, and "Creation Myth," with its restrained epiphany.AEllen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Lib., New York
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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More About the Author
ROBIN MORGAN is an award-winning poet and writer, author of the memoir Saturday's Child, the novel The Burning Time, and the best-selling The Demon Lover: The Roots of Terrorism. One of the founders of contemporary American feminism, she is the author of numerous germinal books about the women's movement, and editor of the classic anthologies Sisterhood Is Powerful, Sisterhood Is Global, and Sisterhood Is Forever.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Dark and Memorable Book,
This review is from: A Hot January: Poems, 1996-1999 (Hardcover)
I came late to Morgan's poetry, knowing her mainly through her prose. But I'd read and liked Upstairs in The Garden, a collection of her new and selected poetry; the poems were complex yet accessible, and some read like intense short stories. So I picked up A Hot January. This one absolutely blew me away. It is dark in its vision but the language really sings, and the journey the poet takes--surviving a lost love, voicelessness, and a bitter madness-- brings her and the reader out to another place, saner, bitterer and wittier, wise. Individual images, characters, lines are lodged in my mind: suicidal whales, the lure of the butcher's daughter, the quiet despair of a farm wife, "our domestic violets"; and the rage, grief, energy, and love/lust in these lines singe the brain. Real poetry, from a real poet.
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