Customer Reviews

Primitive Mentor (Pitt Poetry Series)

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

 

 

This book was pretty good, despite what one reviewer wrote earlier. However, the problem with this book is that Young's style, that unpredictablity of where lines are going and coming from gives the reader little to savor. After reading this book I felt as if the whole thing ran straight through me and I was left with no memorable moments. Make no mistake though, Young's poems are refreshing. His style is reminiscent of the improvisatory poems of Koch, Goldbarth, and even the beats to an extent. He exceeds Koch's mediocre works and Goldbarth's pieces in "The Kitchen Sink," but his style begins to wear after you read through 10 or so poems. The syntax just slides down the page and the attention falls with it. It begins to feel too much like half-riffs rather than a cohesive melody... even disjunctive. Pitt. Poetry series is a good series and tends toward the "anti-academic" strain of a Bob Hicok (who is a professor BTW) and Dean Young, the Pitt series is worth checking out if you are tired of the pretentiousness of heavily "academic" poems (ironically it is a college press???).

I do recommend this book if you like whimsical and perhaps coy approaches to poetics. But for Young's poetry it must be remembered that some kinds of poetry you have to hear like a live concert where there is more energy and more mistakes, instead of a studio album that has been rehearsed to death.

-Pietro

To Glint,
Dean Young is generally, if not exclusively, a brilliant poet and to give one star to anything he's done strikes me as a rather misleading review. To give five stars to this particular collection may not be appropriate either but at least it balances out your rating. Incidentally, I'll assume you meant aberration, I'm unsure who you were quoting when you quoted work and, though it may go without saying, I don't put much stock in your review.

This was a very good read. Most all his poems posed some question about his life's events. "MY Outlook on Life" had a reference to the story of Adam and Eve; others of his poems also had Biblical references. His poetry is very deep and thought provoking. If he isn't posing a question directly, he is leaving the reader questioning the topic of his poems. his poetry has no real rhyme but it does have a certain structure and form. His visions are well thought out and he asks questions without asking. Overall this is a good read for anyone that likes the challenge of good poetry and being left with questions about their own life after each poem they read.

DY was my professor once - and he's about as weird and crazy in real life as his poetry leads you on to believe. Love him, love his work.

Sometimes it feels like enough to say that a book was insanely good.

What I previously thought of as hyper-personalized shades of emotion surrounding bouts of reflection on mortality, selfhood, 'place' in all the macro, cosmological meanings as well as the micro, what-am-I-in-my-various-occurrences-of-family ones turned out to really be a bit more complicated. This is a book that shifts with breakage and tremor along the fault lines that form Young's aesthetic gesture, singular enough to converse on and on as many do about surrealist jumps, the reality post-modern 'collage' that Terry Eagleton say is the only art from we've got left, yet of course intrinsically this just leads to more breakage and nuance (even of every last nuance is accidental, which is really what this book is 'all about'), the camera zooming in and out on exponential scales that defy notions of sense-making in a way that reinforces every last bit of meaning we've felt since listening to water drip down the first cave walls.

The play with mortality is arched up by a sort of warm kindness breathed in like humid air that seems to only be visited on the patients in all the vast terminal wings; sure it's impossible to ignore what I've passingly read about Young's health issues but it beautifully doesn't matter, the hints of this strewn with a careless ease about the book as if Young is saying 'Sure, it's about that, it's about me, but let's get a little more ambitious...' and the camera zooms, even as it sits stationary and solitary.

It's all surrounding the beautiful existential cognitive dissonance of knowing that we're dust motes in the beam of sunlight, sure, but to each mote, no matter how loving and altruistic, we're always our own universe, it all revolves around us at some manner of scale & of course before we had better math and lenses we thought that's how it all really went about. Whether you think poetry is about yourself or not Young feels the same, knows it's both as much as it is neither; the collage sits as a pristine metaphor because every breathing bit in every scene of every micro-poem is Young, isn't him, is you, me, whatever. It's the kind of thinking that dares truly sentimental waxing and Young cast coquettish glances that way his hand guides with far too much irony and experience to let the poems drown.

Like I said: insanely good.

I would rather boil myself alive than read this man's "work" ever again. I certainly hope Mr. Young didn't exert any effort in bringing this abortion to life. I wish I could have the few minutes back in my life wasted on reading this travesty. That old adage about judging a book by it's cover.....well the cover should give it all away.