Customer Reviews

Isolato (Iowa Poetry Prize)

5 star:		(4)
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3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
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I fell in love with Larissa Szporluk's first book, "Dark Sky Question" and I had been anxiously awaiting "Isolato". It was definitely worth the wait. This book is even more complexly gorgeous than the last. I find more to love and get lost in with every reading of her poems. She manages to create a fully real alternate reality with her words -- A reality of jagged breaths, dizzying heights and a spirtuality that's hard to define -- part torture, part rapture. Larissa Szporluk's poetry is wholly unearthly. I've never encountered anything like it before and it is therefore hard to describe. If you haven't read "Dark Sky Question" you may want to read that first to get a feel for the way she writes. If you loved "Dark Sky Question" then definitely get "Isolato".

I enjoyed this book greatly. Unlike most of the books I've read lately by younger poets (so hip and ironic and so fresh from their MFA programs), Szporluk manages to be clever without being pretentious and to write moving poems without being sentimental and ridiculous. I found this book a breath of fresh air.

Larissa Szporluk, Isolato (University of Iowa Press, 2000)

I'm not quite sure what to say about Isolato, Larissa Szporluk's sexy, scary, not-quite-perfect-but-still-much-better-than-anything-you've-ever-chatted-up-in-a-bar second book. I mean, she writes a soliloquy from a meteor. Who does that sort of thing? Larissa Szporluk, that's who, and she does it better than you could ever expect it to have any right to be. She writes poems about the seven seas on the lunar surface (that are, of course, not about the lunar surface at all). And about Jack and the Beanstalk, a modern version, and about prehistoric horses. And compresses it all into one volume that all still manages to have some sort of thematic unity. How does that work? I'm still not quite sure, but it does.

None of this, of course, would mean a thing of Szporluk weren't turning out quality poetry. But she is, or this would be a very different review.

"The plants have gone to witchcraft,
floripondium, owl-tongue, cananga.
She scatters the ribs, the wind, the roads,
increasing her means of isolation.
What cuts across the night for coitus
storms her without warning,
pinning her down. It's the washing
away of her heart on another morning,
the residual body's lost content,
that seeps into the hills like poison...."
("Mare Imbrium")

And if the book has a flaw, and I stress this is a minor quibble at best (and I probably wouldn't be bringing it up at all were I not reviewing it in tandem with George Bilgere's Haywire (q.v.), which is that perfect book), it's the predictability that comes seeping in during the last four lines of that excerpt above. I wouldn't say it makes this poem, or this book, any less of a pleasure to read, but the power of Szporluk's craft is such that it makes me want to be shocked every now and again. Still, this is easily one of the best books I've read so far this year, it's a shoo-in for my Ten Best Reads of the Year list come January 1, and you should absolutely, without question, immediately hunt it down and read it, because this is what great poetry is. **** ½

This is not one of my favorite books. From the first few wandering poems, she doesn't seem like a poet of noteworthy vision. There are places in the book where the thinking is very interesting & the thoughts are indeed rewarding for the reader, but most of the poetry here is not wonderful. I do so much work to find interesting thoughts within these poems...& I read so little great merit of hers that's easy to find...that I'm not even sure how much of the reward I get from reading the book is self-generated. I mean you can find interesting thoughts anywhere in you're trying that hard. In any case, it is interesting to read the work of younger poets such as Szporluck to get a glimpse of the poetry of her generation. & it's not a TERRIBLE book. I just don't know how much of a career as a poet she has ahead of her.

She forces herself into stylistic extremes to make up for having nothing really to say. Basically all she said in this whole book that was almost interesting to me was that blood is water reddened by desire, & even that isn't so exciting. There are so many modern poets whose writing is far better, for instance such young modernists as Karen Volkman, Brenda Shaughnessy, Robyn Schiff, Joanna Goodman, & many, many others. Unlike Larissa Szporluck, they really say things & do things with their work.

An excellent investigation into the contemporary lyric.