Customer Reviews

Modern Life: Poems (Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award)

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

 

 

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.

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. ****

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.

Some years ago I read Harvey's first book with interest. There was a poet of obvious talent, and though the poems frequently struck me as excessively mannered, at the least they showed admirable energy and verve. Unfortunately, based on the evidence here, Harvey seems to have jettisoned everything that had made her debut intriguing and perhaps promising, without having gained anythign in the process. Sure the ornateness (in that book) felt contrived, and the subject matter antiqued, but artifice can be forgiven, while lack thereof cannot. A poem must show choice and judgment.

In that respect this book is severely deficient. Much of it comprises prose chunks that are too haphazard and disjointed to be called prose poems (no, not all vaguely descriptive paragraphs are prose poems). There's a sequence of these purportedly telling the story of an entity called "Robo Boy" as it encounters the world of human objects. It's about emerging consciousness I guess, though the poems don't really relate anything, except random thoughts as they may occur to a poet thinking about writing a poem about an entity called "Robo Boy." Robo Boy might as well not exist, in other words.

The rest are conventionally lineated poems that range from a one-liner to two sequences of poems that are derived from looking at the dictionary between the words "terror" and "future" - no, really! I'm not making that up - called grandly "Terror of the Future" and "The Future of Terror." (Need I say that the poems aren't about any such things?) Such weight and foreboding work entirely against the light Surrealist, light Dadaist bent of the book.

I'm writing this in the hope that Harvey will reconsider her embrace of undisciplined and faddish postmodernishism. And why? In order to be contemporary and relevant? But we're all contemporary! and any genuine expression is relevant, not to the age, but to the people who read poems. Whatever the case, skip this one!

There is something about the voice Harvey has in this collection that got very tiresome to me--something all too proper, too crafted, too cute & smooth around the edges. I liked her last book, Sad Breathing Machine, much more, & now I'm wondering if possibly my taste just changed
or
if actually her poems have become that much less exciting.

1 specific note : the 'Robo-Boy' poems are unbearable. My own personal mother would write the words 'Robo Boy' & find herself (mistakenly) to be very clever, she would.
(& certainly no offense to my mother but certainly she's no poet
& certainly I think we ought to expect more from poets shouldn't we
? something to find us
a little more unexpected ? (& glorious) or
am I off base here
?)

some of the poems were quite enjoyable nonetheless
this time around,
& some lines really made their mark, so I do give 3 stars of 5;
harvey is still more bearable than
most contemporary poets
despite the voice that has gradually become to annoy me.
one could
admittedly
do worse in selecting a book of poems.

my favorite here:

"Do You Understand?"

No grey
rainbow
over the
blackened
land.

This is Harvey's best book of poetry yet. The poems within it are haunting (in the spookiest sense of the word). I've been rereading them for weeks. The book as a whole offers a cohesive vision of the world that is quirky, frightening, engaging, and revelatory. This book is remarkably mature and remarkably honest, and it will linger with you long after you put it down.