The latest volume of this important and highly original poet's work is a three-part journey into the pathology of human emotions. In a cascade of language -- ordinary speech, preaching, song, banter, erudition -- all that is good spirals into regions of horror and grotesque inconsistency with consequences as contemporary as headlines and as eternal as myth. Intense and brilliantly sustained, these poems limn the humane being tested, the plunge into strangeness, and finally recovery, the salvaging of wonder after all.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
With titles like "Ode to the Cat-Headed Consort in a Painting by Bosch" or "Splitting a Double Life," the poems of Moss's finely wrought sixth collection immediately draw us in for a closer look. Moss pulls no punches in giving voice to progenitive biblical myth ("Did Hagar not have Abram eating from her hands as well as from her thighs?") or, chillingly, to Dr. James Marion Sims's gynecological observations of 1845. Throughout, Moss meditates, starkly and unsentimentally, on death and motherhood, on God, and, beneath them all, on sex and power, as in "Heads": "John's head arrives on a platter, knife/ and fork come later, in a civilized moment/ when the kiss tastes funny, when she sucks/ the lips so white she is sure it is talent." Media-swollen cultural debris like Susan Smith's cold-blooded murder of her two sons or the tragedy of recent African American church fires are made to yield their moral crux: "Since fire is power" she concludes of the torchings, "both the supreme good and supreme evil are entitled/ to it." If Moss has largely replaced the more personal voice of books like Rainbow Remnants in Rock Bottom Ghetto Sky (1991), she has here removed to more difficult, more powerful ground. (Mar.) FYI: Moss, a 1996 MacArthur Fellow, has a memoir, Tale of a Sky-Blue Dress, forthcoming from Avon in August.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Moss's protean poems span the page, but they don't read like prose; there's emphatic, pounding rhythm here, a sense of coiled energy that (more often than not) really does spring. Mythic in proportion, filled with religious symbolism, yet showing that as a woman and an African American Moss is keenly aware of the slights and intrusions of contemporary life, these poems often feel larger than life.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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