Customer Reviews

Mysteries of Small Houses (Poets, Penguin)

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An accomplished and moving book, Mysteries of Small Houses shows Alice Notley writing at the top of her form. Her autobiographical poems are rich and detailed, with an immediacy of attention that derives from her roots in the second-generation New York school, and which is used here to show the reader what it was like to have lived, at no small cost, a life dedicated to poetry. There's a highly individual sensibility at work here, and an admirable one.

This is one of the books I most admire in the world. Alice Notley is both brilliant experimental. Reading at least a few pages of this work aloud, allowing the measures the quotation marks frame to be illuminated and articulated, is immensely rewarding. I have re-read it several times over years and it is better each time.

Alice Notley continues to explore the state of the "I' in the poem. This book concentrates on the intersection of memory and biography, what the memory brings to light and what the poetic self creates from that experience. In a linear sense, the series of poems explores Notley's early childhood, school at Iowa, marriage to poet Ted Berrigan and raising two small sons while continuing to write and experiment in New York City. It's interesting for the poet's memories alone, but it's also Notley's dialogue with how the "I" historically has been used in the poem. It's exciting to read Notley's work and to see her continually push the boundaries of her poetics.

I bought this book on Kindle because I'd enjoyed "The Descent of Alette," Notley's epic verse novel. These poems are very different. They are mostly reminiscences from Notley's life. They are self-involved, overly personal poems. Poetry has to have some universal meaning or it's not useful to anyone but the author. Perhaps, if Notley had had a very unusual life, the poems would have been more interesting. I can see why she wrote the poems; what I have trouble understanding is why they were published for the general public.