Customer Reviews

Point and Line

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The critical acclaim that has accompanied this book of poetry into the world was if anything too understated. The writing sparkles like a cut diamond and the sensibility of the poet is unflaggingly curious and observant. Well worth the effort --

I was assigned this book for a writing class, and I confess that I have very little idea of what is going on in it. I kept asking classmates if they could explain a section to me, only to be disappointed when they weren't sure, either! It is an extremely difficult book to grasp as a whole.

However, it is absolutely beautiful. I might not know what Field is trying to say, but I can look at the pages for hours and enjoy how she says it. The layouts of the various pieces mimic the standard styles for other types of writing, while twisting them to suit Field's purpose. Within these pieces, the words themselves seem to be placed to mimic the traditional while saying something completely new, much like the layouts. Examples: the "content" section at the beginning, the "first lines" at the end - both fairly standard for a book of poetry, but with text that does not play the standard role. Instead, these are whole pieces to themselves.

Point and Line requires several reads to fully appreciate it, and I look forward to doing so.

As a homemaker in Pennsylvania, I rarely cross paths with such refreshing and challenging work as Thalia Field's. The chapters "Setting, The Table" and "Walking" opened me up to a whole range of stories buried in the everyday details of the home: "the debris leaves/the deafness of the/elderly or/the watermark of drinking glasses/put down so long/even the stain has aged..." I don't know what to call this book--a poem, a novel, a play? All I know is that it's pretty darn amazing.

The March 6, 2000 edition of Publishers Weekly at p 107 calls this book a "remarkable debut". The reviewer describes the book as a "set of nine discrete poetic essays, post-modern myths, apparently unactable theatre-pieces, versified diaries, extended jokes and fictional experiments (along the tonal lines of Gillian McCain and others)" which "add up to, as the Kandinsky epigraph describes it, 'a new, independent life in accordance with its own laws.'" "'Seven Veils', from which the opening quote is taken, uses long lines to tell the semi- or pseudo-story of a teenager who happens to be a comet as she careens brilliantly through 'dummies,' 'governments,' 'households,' animals and rites of passage. Heavily indebted to Wittgenstein, 'A:.1' interweaves the thoughts of an analysand with ideas about other situations, among them that of a cat in a famous philosophical quandary. 'The Compass Room' experiments with perspectivism, multiple narrators and vague settings, in a way readers of John Barth will recognize: 'Each book has a title and all chapters have numbers,' it opens. 'Walking' tries to recreate the moment-by-moment perceptual experience of a walker in a city, scattering phrases, lists, associations and sentences all over its 23 pages, in an ambitious update of late-model New York School verse. 'Hours' is a postmodern parody of a play-script, with impossible stage directions for 'Microbes' and 'Whales.'" The reviewer concludes: "While the methods of proceeding are familiar, the characters and results are not, making this wonderfully varied first book a real pleasure."

Hermeneutics has always been a difficult word for me. On one hand, I understand it deals with insularity and the innately oppressive force that that kind of inward focus exerts on the subject. On the other hand, the boundaries of hermeneutic influence never seem all that clear (are there boundaries?). And so, whether right or wrong, I always think of hermeneutics in terms of a suffocating inwardness, and all the complications that that would imply.

What does this have to do with Thalia Field's Point and Line? I can't help but think of her book as a hermeneutic study of the lyric I. Perhaps I am probing too literally into the Kandinsky quote that serves as the epigraph, but for me the book probes at its point (the I) to discover what might be possible when extending a point. The book indulges the voice of the lyric I throughout, whether it's the nearly catatonic client in "A [therefore] I," or the hyperdetailed perspective offered in "Walking," Field essentially "leaves the mic on" for the lyric self to express and express, until we realize there need be no fatigue to the lyric. The pressures of a hermeneutic self create a perfect Carnot engine for generating language. May it be ad infinitum!

I would venture to say that Field is the Experimentalist Extraordinaire, at least when it comes to thinking through this subjective self. Allegory, stream of consciousness, imaginary families, dramatic productions. There is no shortage to Field's resources, and there is no conceptual boundary she's unwilling to cross. In the poem "Seven Veils," who is Sal? What is Sal? Just for some lyrical fun, I like making Sal (who is either a him or a her or an it or an interstellar comet that has a room in the palace) that client from "A [therefore] I." Why not? Field's experimentalism is infectious. I'll say it makes me an Experimentalist Reader, and Field offers a lot of material for a reader to experiment with.

What I'm most fascinated by, though, are Field's [bracketed phrases]. And here I return to the Kandinsky relationship between point and line. The [phrases] remind me of reading Timothy Donnelly's itemized poems in Twenty-Seven Props, if only in the way they seize the flow of language and prioritize a conceptual framework. But Field's [bracketed phrases] often come in the course of a dialogue between characters. If a reader were to fill in the blank with what the brackets say they should, with "7 outdated objects that dangle" or "3 symptoms of epilepsy," then the dramatic "conversation" Field has staged between her characters would veer into the absurd. Field chooses instead to hold down the volume, so that you have to speculate about why this character would be asking the reader to list these items. Why would a Monkey be thinking of 7 outdated objects that dangle? Why would an Unformatted Child be thinking of 3 symptoms of epilepsy? The "conversation" becomes a game where I try to read each character's subjective reasoning. And, even further, to consider that subjective reasoning in light of the ridiculous dramatic situation Field has staged these conversations in.

Yes, the book is exhaustive. It could be exhausting, unless you're the ambitious reader who rises to the book's obviously ambitious scope. I don't even know where to say Point and Line proposes its ending is. According to the "Impotence of First Lines," there's a p. 998 somewhere!

The book is amazing. People who think the book is post-modern, experimental hype are people who, I imagine, still read Tennyson aloud to their parakeets and, to boot, can hold converstions about Tennyson with humans at parties. Field's book, on the other hand, is something to take with you, as a map, when you are alone in New York City or Alaska, and your mind and body feel a bit numb. Wake up! This is a book to make your spine go white. Check out Kim Fortier's review in Rain City. Let's not be boring.

I anticipated this book more than almost any other new young poet's collection of the past year. The "blurbs" accompanying the book are extraordinary, announcing Field as a virtual literary savior for her generation. Yet, unfortunately, the experimental, whimiscal, and nonsensical formal play in the book makes for all dazzle and dance and very little else. These poems look gorgeous on the page, intriguing, inviting because they simply *look* exciting, and yet the stories and thinking and images in each fall blandly, flatly, dead silent on the ground. For all its experimentation, the book actually borders on the cliche.