Customer Reviews

The Mind-Body Problem: Poems

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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

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.

"The Mind Body Problem" is a book of poetry by Katha Pollitt; I bought it because it includes her fabulous poem "Two Cats," which Garrison Keillor read on "The Writer's Almanac."

These are accessible, insightful and engaging poems. All of them are short, which I think is a virtue. Almost all strike a chord of bittersweet nostalgia and loss, as in "Collectibles," in which Pollitt muses over the various knick-knacks she has collected over her life:

"Innocent, foolish, jaunty, trivial
small travelers from a land that thought it was
so full of love and coziness and cheer
the least things shared in it - why should
they pain us so somehow, who know so well
it wasn't like that, not really, even then?
Is that what they have come so far to tell us?
That we lose even what we never had?

I buy few books of poems and read even fewer, but I'm glad I made an exception for "The Mind Body Problem."

Katha Pollitt's poetry is just as good as her essays, which have arguemnts as clear and logical as glass.

The poems come in a variety of forms. Her rhymes have wit and intelligence (comic and lunatic, Madame and pari-mutuel system). but it is her free verse with regular iambs rolling along at a steady natural trot that say the most to me in her authoritative voice about aging, and the transience of life, and death.

"When I was eight or nine, I used to play
that suddenly I'd become invisible."

("Walking in the Mist")

"...why go on? Death can't help but look friendly
when all your friends live there, while more and more

each day's like a smoky party
where the music hurts and strangers insist that they know you"

("Old")

These poems are easy to read and hard to forget.