An exuberant and bold series of poems drawing on the poet's life in the Catskill Mountains. Questions of exile and belonging figure prominently, as does the struggle to find a viable relationship with the natural world. In the chainsaw—the book's central image—all manner of human traits are reflected with an intense, often comical brilliance.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Raised and educated in England, Lasdun now makes his home in New York's Catskill Mountains, whence his poems, short stories and novels now issue. These witty, personal poems and sequences consider the poet's move from Britain to America and meditate on his family's new surroundings. Lasdun shows, however, an Englishman's distrustful amusement at American self-confidence, and at masculine violence "Returning the Gift" is the best, and the longest, of several poems about the titular chainsaw and the talkative local who sells them. Other poems remember prep-school hippies and English pubs; contemplate Lasdun's Anglo-Jewish heritage; or evoke the neat brambles of nearby forests. His best poems combine those virtues with his considerable gift for short, crackling narrative the quick plot of "Property: The Bear" withstands comparison to its Frostian models. But readers will find the inoculating irony of some of Lasdun's Frederick Seidel-like quips insufficient: "The locals,/ Esopus Algonquins,/ having already been massacred,/ there's no-one with greater claims to an acre// than you have." Lasdun (Woman Police Officer in Elevator) delights in turning a deft stanza, or in bringing highbrow allusions (Heidegger, say) down to homely earth; he can also reveal a self-deprecating wit reminiscent of Merrill. With their Audenesque epigrams, fluent stanzas and English background, the works gathered here will certainly make Anglophile readers perk up their ears, but beyond the dressings, these are really just more autobiographical poems from a literate, white, middle-aged, male speaker. (July) Forecast: Lasdun's reputation in Britain rests on two previous books of poems, on his prose fiction, and on the well-known anthology After Ovid, which he coedited with Michael Hofmann. Any sales here will have to be driven by the fiction, which has yet to find a significant audience here.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Review
The prose drowned in these memorable verses [is] all the richer for the immersion. Fortified Lasdun, fortunate us! -- Richard Howard
[A] nervy and unnerving book, a canny and unsettling book-urgent, tender, large-souled. No serious reader should miss it. -- J. D. McClatchy, editor of The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry
[A] nervy and unnerving book, a canny and unsettling book-urgent, tender, large-souled. No serious reader should miss it. -- J. D. McClatchy, editor of The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry
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5.0 out of 5 stars
A Great Clearing in the Forest,
By
This review is from: Landscape with Chainsaw: Poems (Hardcover)
In the forest of contemporary poetry most of what grows seems to obstruct passage, kill the view, and generally make the world darker. You need a machete, or better yet a chainsaw, just to cut through to sunlight. Very occasionally, however, one stumbles across a clearing, and Lasdun's "Landscape with Chainsaw" is such an occasion. This poet's wit and mastery of language make him a true pleasure to read, but they alone are not what make this book important. According to his bio notes, Lasdun grew up in England and now lives in upstake New York, in the Catskills. Now I'm no special fan of the brits, but this is the rare case of a writer who, coming to America, ends up telling us things about ourselves we are either too close or desensitized to know. Lasdun is tuned in to history, to literature, to his neighbors, to himself and to the land. Both literally and figuratively these poems are about landing in a foreign landscape and cutting into it, again, (after first overcoming a sense of presumption and squeamish prejudice against doing so) in order simply to be able to park oneself there, to infuse it with personal meaning, to make it "home." This collection has a thrilling thematic coherence; the poems gain in power and seem to be speaking to one another as you read on. Get your hands on this book. At the very least it's a sound financial investment: twenty years from now it will be as valuable as, say, a first edition of Robert Lowell's "Life Studies."
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