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12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
So This is How You Live in the Present, January 15, 2008
This review is from: Modern Life: Poems (Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award) (Paperback)
Matthea Harvey has always empathized with the objective world, introducing emotions to the world of objects. We were taught by her first book to pity the bathtub's forced embrace of the human form, in her second book she blurred humanity and machinery into a sad little breathing machine. In Modern Life she expands on her thesis, showing us the strange world made stranger still by the world itself, a sort of "taxidermist's version of the world" as she says in one poem, nature in an unnatural way. There's a playful aspect to the poems, one side is that she is making the world strange, with ham-flowers and girls sprouting electrical outlets ( or -from the cover- dominoes with blackberries rather than dots), but the other side of it is admitting that much of the strangeness, some of the more horrifying bits of modern life, is our own doing.
She organizes her long series of poems, "The Future of Terror" and "The Terror of the Future" in a sort of abecedaria, using the words "future" and "terror" as guideposts in getting her vocabulary, achieving a sort of sprung rhythm. "The Future of Terror" is militaristic and male while "The Terror of the Future" is more personal, female, but both are ill-at-ease in the current state of things. In the center of the book is a series of seven poems about Robo-boy. These poems, far from being a fanciful sci-fi digression, exemplify her empathy for objects as she goes about making a robot more alive than the people who populate her poems, people who have "glass-faces" and "slot-machine mouths" who get their words from teleprompters rather than as Robo-boy who learns about the word "subjectivity" by creating art. This also introduces her fascination with duality, of halving, of making one like the other or snipping this world from that in a sort of poetic shadowbox, even centaur-ing drawbridges and strawberries inventing strawbridges and drawberries.
You read Matthea Harvey not to help you understand the world, but to feel how strange it is, similar to the reasons for riding a teeter-totter. And like any partner in that noble endeavor she too will lean down on her end and leave you stranded in the air. The kicking and screaming will do you no good, but afterwards, when the wooziness is gone, you feel that there was something awfully fun in being there.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Perfect when it's on its game, still good when it isn't., March 30, 2009
This review is from: Modern Life: Poems (Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award) (Paperback)
Matthea Harvey, Modern Life (Graywolf Press, 2007)
"The ham flowers have veins and are rimmed in rind, a little meat sunset."
("Implications for Modern Life")
I opened Matthea Harvey's Modern Life, turned to the first page, and was greeted with this as an introduction to her work. How could I not immediately fall in love? And I'm happy to say that as the collection progresses, it pretty much stay this good. Of course, the pit- and pratfalls of this sort of comic-grotesque brilliance do appear along the way, and it's not all as wonderful as one might hope; there are a handful of poems in this collection that are simply far too precious for their own (or anyone else's) good, viz, the complete text of "A Theory of Generations":
You're it.
You're it.
You're it.
...and two entire sections of the book are taken up with odd abecedarian exercises ("The Future of Terror" and "Terror of the Future" respectively) which, by their very nature, tend to sound forced on occasion. But when Matthea Harvey is on her game, as she is in the bulk of the work to be found here, it's pure gold. Here I had intended to insert a choice bit of "The Lost Marching Band", my favorite piece in the book, but as I read it again, I realize it's not possible to pull out a fragment. I cannot recommend highly enough that you grab yourself a copy of this one and read it yourself, as well as the rest of the book; this is a whole lot of fun. ****
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1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great poet., March 12, 2009
This review is from: Modern Life: Poems (Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award) (Paperback)
As a new reader of poetry, I was delighted to find a book with such diversity. Matthea Harvey has put together collection of work that is very engaging. I really enjoyed this book and have already recommended to a few friends.
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