Customer Reviews

Lovers in the Used World (Poetry Series)

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Gillian Conoley's poems ignite like tinder on the page. Language here produces sparks, then heat, as it rubs up against spare syntax and lush images. White space (and silence), like oxygen, increase combustion. Indeed Conoley concerns herself as much with "a space preceding the image and a space following" as she does with the fragments that she feeds to the fire. She effectively uses repetition of structure (for example, four poems entitled The World that frame the collection), word and phrase to further expand space, and experience, in her poems. Repetition evokes "many people doing the same thing period," their "used" gestures and utterances reiterated through time and space to create what might be "eternity." Lovers In The Used World is a book of poems well worth a close read.

Gillian Conoley, Lovers in the Used World (Carnegie Mellon, 2001)

Gillian Conoley does not strike me as a happy camper. Her poems snap off the page at you, their language seemingly ready to beat you if you so much as look at it the wrong way. This could, of course, be a reaction to my recently reading so much of the pristine, academic type stuff that's seemingly in more vogue than usual these days (comparisons of Conoley to Jorie Graham, as have been posited by some others, strike me as especially odd, as Graham typifies that particular school), but, well, these poems snap.

Conoley doesn't really sound like a language poet much (though she does fall into that rut a time or two in this collection), but she's certainly not above borrowing their syntax to suit her needs; odd spacings and such abound here. It's possible that it all has a reason, but as someone who's never been able to figure out the complex linguistic trickery that language poets are seemingly offering with their ways of sticking stuff on the page, I can personally attest that this stuff would read just as good if Conoley had put it on the page in nothing but heroic couplets; it's the words, and how they sound when you put them together, that's important, and these words sound very good when put together.

Worthwhile. Check it out. *** ½