The Mind-Body Problem: Poems [Hardcover]

Katha Pollitt (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 9, 2009

In The Mind-Body Problem, Katha Pollitt takes the ordinary events of life–her own and others’–and turns them into brilliant, poignant, and often funny poems that are full of surprises and originality. Pollitt’s imagination is stirred by conflict and juxtaposition, by the contrast (but also the connection) between logic and feeling, between the real and the transcendent, between our outer and inner selves: Jane Austen slides her manuscript under her blotter, bewildered young mothers chat politely on the playground, the simple lines of a Chinese bowl in a thrift store remind the poet of the only apparent simplicities of her childhood. The title poem hilariously and ruefully depicts the friction between passion and repression (“Perhaps / my body would have liked to make some of our dates, / to come home at four in the morning and answer my scowl / with ‘None of your business!’ ”). In a sequence of nine poems, Pollitt turns to the Bible for inspiration, transforming some of the oldest tales of Western civilization into subversive modern parables: What if Adam and Eve couldn’t wait to leave Eden? What if God needs us more than we need him?

With these moving, vivid, and utterly distinctive poems, Katha Pollitt reminds us that poetry can be both profound and accessible, and reconfirms her standing in the first rank of modern American poets.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Pollitt now enjoys national fame for her political columns and her personal essays; she gained attention earlier, though, as a poet—Antarctic Traveller (1982) won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Twenty-seven years later, this second collection shows her fine ear and eye, urbane tones, attention to the ups and downs of middle age and motherhood, and her debts to Elizabeth Bishop, whose most ardent fans will find Pollitt at her worst derivative, but at her best a wise and worthy heir. Shore Road just rewrites Bishop's Filling Station (somebody/ crew-cuts the crab-grass... puts out the plastic lawn chairs). Poems about biblical scenes and characters seem thin compared to Bishop's prodigal son. Yet when Pollitt uses Bishop's careful and careworn tones for autobiography, she achieves wry, urbane retrospect and a power all her own: Old Sonnets, for example, recalls Pollitt's undergraduate poetic ambitions; Always Already considers how the adult writer loses herself in the forest of other works, where culture is a kind of nature,/ a library of oak leaves,/ muttering their foregone oracles. No one is likely to call Pollitt's verse radically new. Yet these poems can rise far above their promptings, as fleeting verse about an urban scene can rise to representative powers: often enough, Pollitt does. (June)
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Review

“At the center of every poem lurks the poet, but Katha Pollitt balances the self-regard of the craft with a fervent interest in the profusion of the world–knickknacks, summer bungalows, dogs, bees, lilacs, mandarin oranges, and more. And her clear, observant eye brings it all into steady focus. This is one long-awaited volume that was well worth the wait.”—Billy Collins, former United States Poet Laureate

“It’s awfully good to have such a great-hearted poet as Katha Pollitt take on mortality’s darkest themes. Again and again she finds a human-sized crack of light and squeezes us through with her.”—Kay Ryan, United States Poet Laureate

“So much has happened to the world since Katha Pollitt published her debut collection, Antarctic Traveller, in 1982, yet what has happened to her poetry is a fascinating progress of distinction, of steadying insight, and of meditative enrichment. Poems like ‘Night Subway’ and ‘Trying to Write a Poem Against the War’ show an undaunted consciousness of this daunting quarter century, but Pollitt’s most surprising gift, to be savored only now in poem after poem, is the proof that primaveral raptures were literally premature, that our high middle ages are worth all they cost, that life’s truest poetry is in the second half.”—Richard Howard, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 96 pages
• Publisher: Random House (June 9, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400063337
• ISBN-13: 978-1400063338
• Product Dimensions: 5.6 x 0.6 x 8.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #971,468 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Katha Pollitt's poetry examines life's small moments -- from the Houston Chronicle, July 21, 2009

By 

Field 31 (New York, New York USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Mind-Body Problem: Poems (Hardcover)

This second book of poems by Katha Pollitt comes more than 25 years after her award-winning debut collection, Antarctic Traveller. Pollitt has had other writing priorities during that quarter century (she is best known as a columnist and has published four volumes of non-fiction), but individual poems have continued to appear in high-profile places such as The New Yorker and The Best American Poetry series. Pollitt has now, finally, brought them together in a strong and coherent collection.

The Mind-Body Problem has already won high praise from fellow poets such as Billy Collins, and from the opening poem (also the title poem), you can see the qualities in Pollitt's work that would attract Collins, a fellow specialist in the art of the unexpected metaphor; Pollitt likens the mind's disregard of the body to "an ambitious / English-professor ashamed of his wife / her love of sad movies, her budget casseroles / and regional vowels."

Whether she is re-imagining the lost city of Atlantis or refocusing familiar stories from the Bible, Pollitt's constant concern is to examine the prosaic underpinnings of life, the "small daily moments / of beauty, renewal, calm" that sustain us when "we've lost our moment of grandeur" or grown "tired of transcendence." She observes that while "in theory" we long for lives that are "hard and pure, like marble statues," most of us are most of the time "content to be at home in this crumbling / city of appearances and salsa." In Visitors, the dead return not to haunt or denounce us, "but just to take pleasure in everyday life."

In A Walk, Pollitt says she admires "more than ever the ancient Chinese poets / who were comforted in exile by thoughts of the transience / of life," and many of the best poems here have an imagistic delicacy reminiscent of Chinese and Japanese poetry. The Heron in the Marsh is like a series of interlocking haiku, in which the poet finds in nature the perfect projection for her mind's burden: Wanderer, lordless / samurai / with only yourself for armor, / tell me, why is loss real / even when love was not?"

Not every poem in the collection sustains the taut, line-by-line excellence of The Heron, but overall The Mind-Body Problem is impressively problem-free.

Robert Cremins is a Houston writer and regular contributor to the Houston Chronicle.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Buy this book! Review of The Mind-Body Problem from The Nation magazine, September 1, 2009

By 

Grundoon (NYC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Mind-Body Problem: Poems (Hardcover)

Only last year, longtime Nation favorite Katha Pollitt was stirring up the blogosphere with the personal essays she collected in Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories (now in paperback). Her new collection, The Mind-Body Problem (Random House), is a book of poems, and the two books would make for a provocative and satisfying boxed set.

Readers who revel in Pollitt's crisp humor, soundly made sentences and memorable comparisons will find plenty to savor in these poems, often as playful as they are moving. The landscape here is friendly ground: the intersecting lives of New York City, the peculiar habits of memory and the lively presence of literary and historical characters in the life of the mind.

While The Mind-Body Problem is steeped in compassion for the human condition, it's also a righteously graceful dossier on the misuses of power and the resulting waste of human spirit. Whether she's writing about the deadly days of Jane Austen heroines ("Talk about rural idiocy!") or channeling Job after that little incident with the boils ("People even said he looked taller'/'in his fine new robes: You see?'/'When one door closes, two doors open"), she asks us to ask ourselves, Just who's in charge here, anyway? Can we as vulnerable people--lovers, mothers, children, writers, citizens--speak truth and humor to power and make a stand worth recording? Pollitt's book answers with a triumphant and confident yes. EMILY GORDON

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars As perceptive as expected, October 9, 2009

By 

J. G. Sonka (San Diego CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Mind-Body Problem: Poems (Hardcover)

I've read Katha Pollit's column for years and expected something extraordinary in her poetry. I was not disappointed. Her work is insightful, intelligent, wise, as always.