Customer Reviews

Nude Siren

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Go home with me...It's about time I say something about this book. It's been sitting on my desk, along with Chelsey Minnis's Zirconia and Frank O'Hara's Collected, for nearly a year. Each of these books is like a trough I feed at. I find Nude Siren particularly liberating and generative. No one can reinvent language the way Richards can and still maintain emotional urgency in each and every poem. Other poems that try to do so become disembodied--just words. Right now I keep re-reading the last third of the book, poems which seem to be written by a posthumous speaker. In "At the fair the solemnity of her dress," "wind is a broken off piece of the fair." It is so tender and there is too much to quote in this beautiful book. I always tell my students the Wittgenstein quotation, "The limits of your language are the limits of your world." This poet's world doesn't seem to have any limits.

Peter Richards' second collection of poems, _Nude Siren_, is wildly alive and at play in its own magically attractive worlds. These poems are clearly explorations, experimentations by a poet who loves words--loves the taste of them, the texture, the way they drip through his fingers onto the page...
This is a book that contemporary poets should own. It teaches us to embrace the "inner suggestions" the mornings "suggest to themselves and to me / who cannot hear the morning." It is a book to be kept under your pillow, to be taken out only when you feel capable of setting yourself adrift through his many "Bulb[s] of Percussion." At times whimsical, at times dark, always sincere and thoroughly convincing, these poems will grab you on the inside, in places you didn't even know you had.