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Brenda Shaughnessy's beautifully controlled poems house a virtually uncontainable intensity. Haunted and hopeful, fevered and willfully flawed, they seek out multifarious avenues of access to the "strumpet muscle" of the human heart in language that gyrates between necessity and invention. Here is the next illogical step in love poetry.
In Shaughnessy's visceral wonderland, obsession and poison go hand in hand, mirrors make people vanish, and nuns are definitely not safe in their alabaster chambers. She's ever intent on rescuing (or wresting) us from our easy beliefs. "The Question and Its Mark" is her stunning take on the myth of Leda and the Swan, its final couplet reading: "Leda possessed a pair of knees that also bent / in prayer. I ask of you only what she asked for there." Yes, this poet knows her tropes, and has a sure synesthetic touch. Her pairs of women are "hot with mixed / light drunk with insult," and her private language--in which words such as blue, strumpet, and silver reverberate--soon becomes a kind of lingua franca between her and the reader. In her debut, Shaughnessy's debt to the surrealists, particularly to Dorothea Tanning, is visible and audible on each page. She's also a distant and distancing poetic relative of Sylvia Plath, wielding a similar jaunty threat. "Epithalament," her twist of an epithalamium, invokes a woman lost--and begins: "Other weddings are so shrewd on the sofa, short / and baffled, basset-legged." What better combination could there be of tradition, the individual talent, and the razor-sharp imagination? --Kerry Fried
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Yes and then again...,
By A Customer
This review is from: Interior with Sudden Joy (Hardcover)
I was wowed by the first Shaughnessy poems I read -- jazzy, surprising, sexy. But there's not a lot more in a whole book of Shaughnessy poems than there are in a few Shaughnessy poems. Still, she has the tools to expand her range, so this is definitely a poet to watch.
6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An exciting debut,
By la escritoria (Bennington, VT) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Interior with Sudden Joy: Poems (Paperback)
Rather than a "terminal adolescence", Shaugnessy presents us with a lexicon that is personal to the point of transcendence. She is both baroque and minimalist--at times ornate, at other times exacting to the point of abstraction. At times she creates a word to alter a familiar atmosphere, and at other times beckons the reader to rediscover words in their most precise and original definitions. Her poems are as deep and as deliberate as the great poets that have influenced her work--her plays on language and decisive structures are vessels for meaning that is not only totally expressed but entirely her own. It is both to her credit and our misfortune that she is the only female poet currently represented by FSG. As a student and an avid reader, to my mind she is one of the greatest American poets working today.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Interior of Language -- Pain, Joy, and the Limitations of Expressivity,
This review is from: Interior with Sudden Joy: Poems (Paperback)
I disagree with the negative reviews here, blasting Shaughnessy for using big words. She is a poet -- poets are all about exploring language of all kinds and Shaughnessey does so in combinations that are remarkable, surprising, and thought-provoking. I've never read anyone like her. I love her work. And it IS work. For both the reader and writer. And I find it most rewarding.
Shaughnessey's may be seen by some as academic poetry, but I read in her words the plain pain of the inability of language, words, spaces, to convey the feeling state -- but she comes awfully close. This is why I think her language is so obtuse to some -- they are not reading the difficulty between words as a difficulty of linguistic significance. And her poetry seems often terrifying, or terrified. Other poems seem beautiful. She takes amazing risks in putting words and phrases together that seem far apart. In bringing them together, perhaps some readers do not want to risk facing the bridge between words and what will be revealed to them by crossing that bridge. Shaughnessey is not a poet whose poems can be read once and done away with. Nor should they be. They linger for me, unforgettable. This is a book I constantly come back to in wonder. How does she come up with these personifications and metaphors? They are fresh, so fresh I cannot place them. My favorite poem, "Jouissance," begins, "Your phantoms hang neatly from skyhooks, ready to be veils, ready to disembody you. You have shelled yourself of this curved room and the smell is of burnt door, slackbelly hot. It is an albattoir, lacking it's usual firmness. [...] You are all rain-collected, in a butterfly sac opaque and draining. The description of this you hold under like a genius in dark water. (10-11) "Jouissance" is a French word in which there is no adequate equivalent in English, it is always a feminine word, referring to femininity and intense joy/rapture and sometimes giving up oneself, as in orgasm. Lacan coined the word and he believed femininity was a kind of madness, to put it bluntly, at least that is my take. My further take is that Lacan succumbed to madness, but that is another story. Try Catherine Clement, _The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan. If you can find it in a used book store. But the poem above, there is so much there. Each word can take on different meanings. The imagery of the burnt door is powerful. So she uses unusual words. Are there rules that poetry should only use a high school vocabulary? This is a poet whose poems demand contemplation. And for me, that contemplation is worth it. It has inspired many poems of my own. Poets who experiment with language in this way, in this precise way and not just in a post-modern spew, are those to learn from. In many poems you might not like the insights at first, but who says poetry is meant to please? At least in this contemporary age, where people are uninspired and outright told not to think to deeply, here is a poet who thinks deeply and who is vastly inspired. She encourages people to read slowly and savor every word, phrase, line, sentence. And to go back and re-savor it once they read the next line and find a different meaning, or an expansion of meaning. She slows down the skim- reading where everything is in a hurry and must therefore be transparent. I love that her poems are not transparent. One poem becomes many poems in a sea of meaning -- and uncertainty. If you are uncomfortable with uncertainty in poetry, you may have difficulty reading her poems. I recommend just letting that uncertainty be and trusting your own imagination and what she evokes in you. Distaste may actually be present in the poem itself. In this way, among others, I concur that she is not an easy read. Sure -- her poems are not for everyone. It depends upon what you look for in poetry. I look for innovation and grace and emotion and inspiration and sometimes devastation and the "surprise me" factor. She certainly does surprise me. And if I need a dictionary to read her poems, so be it. I LOVE words. I'll admit some of her poems are not as strong as others. But she is such a young poet. Even her less strong poems have that "something" that makes a poem stand out. I cannot wait to read her next book. If it is full of emotion through such unusual imagery as this one, I will be happy to be moved in whatever ways her poems take me. Again and again. This is a poet I always come back to. It is as if she has a grip on the psyche and can put it into words that evoke the strong images that we like to keep hidden. Not to say that there isn't a lovely love poem thrown into the mix here and there. Shaughnessey is an eclectic poet and young as she is, I hope to hear much more from her pantheon of vivid, striking images.
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