From Publishers Weekly
Three mysterious letters (two beginning "Dear Master") written by Emily Dickinson and discovered after her death are the starting point for Brock-Broido's (A Hunger) second collection. The 52 works in this extended tribute echo many of Dickinson's stylistic and formal devices and often exhibit a similar stance toward their subjects. The poems are celebrations of language, often contorting words and syntax into surprising new shapes, at their best (e.g., "The Supernatural Is Only The Natural, Disclosed") playing in the mind like music, with a meaning and beauty that outreach literal comprehension: "I'm listening/ to the fluorescent light come on/ In April, flinging a hot white scarf/ Across a month mottled by the chemicals/ Of eastern standard time." At their weakest, the works are self-consciously literary, overstuffed with allusion and reference. But Brock-Broido is clearly a kindred spirit to the Belle of Amherst, an audacious writer possessed of a grave intensity, as in the prose piece "Haute Couture Vulgarity": "I have too much of the martyr, would set myself ablaze?just for the bright light of the fire, a curiosity, for a cause if I had one, a Flame." This is a brave collection; challenging, sometimes difficult, ambitious and relentless in its experimentation with language and form.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
A simple idea: loosely base a book of poems on Emily Dickinson's letters. Of course, it is not such a simple idea, especially when the three strangest letters have been chosen as a leadoff. These are the marvelous, even erotic Master Letters, addressed to an unknown recipient, the Master, perhaps God, but never sent. The gifted Brock-Broido (A Hunger, LJ 9/15/88) proffers a vision sustained by an arresting voice variously dominant and submissive to the shadow presence, the Master: "In a gospel/According to Hunters, you name your bird/Without a gun. You sit & watch as one does in the woods,/Contemplating prey, awefully. You've a heart as large/as a silver cleat, small thing." These poems are hard to pin down, and perhaps that is the point: Brock-Broido gives the impression of writing within her subject?a solitary voice trapped in simultaneous history where truth and cliche lie only in the ruins of revelation. In one of the last, something of the method may be revealed: "In winter when moss sheathes every thing alive/& everything not or once alive./ That I would be?dryadic, gothic, fanatic against/The vanishing; I will not speak to you again." One only hopes this is not the case. Highly recommended.?Steven R. Ellis, Pennsylvania State Univ. Libs., University Park
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
