Customer Reviews

Intruder: Poems

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Jill Bialosky, Intruder (Knopf, 2008)

I read Jill Bialosky's The End of Desire a few years back, and found it enjoyable enough if rough around the edges. Reading Intruder, I was ready to proclaim that the edges had been smoothed out and Bialosky had really found her voice here. Then I got to the fifth section of the book, and it all came back.

"This is how she imagines it. A stillness.

He enters the room and is not afraid.

Once the poet watched a fence being torn down

picket by picket. It was white and surrounded a garden...."

("The Poet Contemplates the Sunflowers")

I've talked in myriad reviews about how some folks believe that if you chop anything up into little lines you can call it poetry. Bialosky isn't even chopping it up into little lines; that's declarative prose, right there, with the only line breaks meant to keep something of the uniform about length. Is it good? Bad? I'll leave that to the individual reader to decide, but one thing it isn't is poetry.

Thankfully, the fifth section is only one section of the book, and the rest of it is much more poetic, as well as being a lot more polished.

"She was in her kitchen,

with the cool blue impenetrable quiet

she had craved and she remembered

the excursion of his warm hand

on her skin, the idea of a family

he had embodied..."

("The End of Love")

Feel how much more languid that is, how much freer-flowing? (Though that "and" in the third line could have been dispensed with; it jags.) Most of the book is like this, and that is a good thing. Worth checking out of the library to see if you want a copy on your shelf. ***