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5.0 out of 5 stars
An Amazing Modern Poet, October 14, 2002
This review is from: The Land Of Bliss (Pitt Poetry Series) (Paperback)
Cathy Song is one of my favorite modern poets. Her poem "Sunworshippers"from her last book, School Figures, may be my favorite poem written in the past 10 years. In this book, The Land of Bliss, Song continues to develop as a poet and presents us with another collection of beautiful and moving verse.
The opening poem of the collection, "Pokanini girl," is reminiscent of Gwendolyn Brooks' "We Real Cool" but with a painful humor lacking in Brooks' sparse verse. Much of Song's strength in her verse comes from an uncanny ability to write mature poetry with the voice of a child. She is at once both adult and child. And she is very connected to her family and history (Chinese immigrants living in Hawaii). It gives much of her poetry an amazing power.
I am also struck by the recurrence of the color blue in these poems: poems with titles like "Blue," "Blueroses" and "The Sky-Blue Dress." There are blue roses painted on the box in "The Roses of Guadalajara," blue sleeves in "A City of Sleeves" and the hanging letters on pale blue lines in "Book of Hours." This color of sadness is a key to the tone of melancholy that runs through much of Song's work. And yet the beauty remains as illustrated in the recurrence of flowers and, in particular, roses.
I am constantly reminding people that, yes, the poetry of the past masters is wonderful but there is also a lot of amazing poetry still being written today. We just need to work a little harder to seek it out than the readers of past eras. Well, if you've come upon this review you have found your way to a wonderful modern poet. I would highly recommend this book.
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3.0 out of 5 stars
Gets better as it goes along., November 1, 2007
This review is from: The Land Of Bliss (Pitt Poetry Series) (Paperback)
Cathy Song, The Land of Bliss (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001)
It has taken me a long time to write this review, relatively; I finished Land of Bliss almost a month ago as I write this. Since then, I've been wrestling with one of the eternal questions: how do you give a lukewarm review to one of your favorite writers without feeling horrible?
And Cathy Song is one of my favorite writers. Her first two books, Picture Bride and Frameless Windows, Squares of Light, were two of the first books that really set me on the path to writing serious poetry. I've bought and sold a lot of books over the years, but I still have those two. I've read them more times than I can count. Thus, when I stumbled across a copy of this one, I snatched it up, opened it, read the first few pages... and absolutely hated them. The shock was almost physical. This was Cathy Song? It didn't sound like Cathy Song, it sounded like bad improvised slam poetry by some guy who's never written a poem in his life and has had too much to drink, but gets up to the microphone anyway. I kept reading, and it kept being bad, and I kept hoping it would get better.
The good news is that it does, eventually. The second half of the book may well be as good as Song's early work. I can't tell you, I was still too traumatized by the first half when I was reading, but rest assured the following excerpt comes from the second half of the book:
Once awakened I longed for the breath
she breathed through the window, my body
rising to the petals borne across
the blue distances of roses.
Impatient with dusting,
I fell through the cracks of the random
inspections of the absentminded ones
who had yet to count me among the missing--
the idle, yes--
a small heap of bones
to one day be sewn
into something useful.
("Blueroses")
That's the Cathy Song I know and love. And the second half of this book is worth the price of admission by itself. Unfortunately, the first half makes it worth avoiding entirely, You make the call. ** ½
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