Amazon.com Review
Steven Cramer gets at the heart of Alice Fogel's writing when he distinguishes between poems that are careful and soft-spoken and poems that are meek. Fogel's writing is often the former, very rarely the latter. Fogel's work has been anthologized in the Best American Poetry series (1993), and it is her controlled tone and concentrated energy that account for much of her work's appeal. "Returns" is the strongest poem to my ear. Fogel describes the constant tension between motion and stillness in the world, the way earthquakes and volcanoes "have their roots at the stillest center" before they bloom, then notes: "And still you call a rock a rock / and mean unchanged."
From Publishers Weekly
This volume begins auspiciously, with a steadfast gaze at the natural world as intense and perfectly rendered as that of Rilke's famous panther. Fogel understands waiting, whether for fruit to ripen or for Michelangelo's unfinished sculptures to fulfill their potential. She was, as she confesses in a later poem, a child who wanted "to be kind, to love the world" the same way in which she "wanted to be loved." Too infrequently, however, does Fogel acknowledge the adult awareness that humans and nature are not identical. The more populated her landscapes become, the closer she veers toward cliche ("winds of loss" and "evil of despair") and animals are burdened with human emotion, as a newborn lamb, runt of a triplet birth, is addressed: "Your anger keeps you alive." When Fogel holds to the marvelous specificities of the opening poems, rather than abstractly considering themes of love, loss and destiny, her poems demonstrate a fierce and admirable passion.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
