Customer Reviews

Ps3569.L3: Poems (Poetry)

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Here, Slavitt has once again shown that our modern society can still support the weight of serious poetry. Mixing humor and _gravitas_ simultaneously, he also combines the past with the present and the personal with the universal. Doesn't every person wonder how he or she will be remembered -- as a name (like Pindar) or as a number upon a shelf?

PS3569.L3's title is taken from the beginning of the Library of Congress number for Mr. Slavitt's books, of which there are quite a few at this point. The title poem is a fun-loving and self-deprecating meditation on literary success.

This book is of an aesthetic whole -- the tone of which is set by the playful title. The poem "Tryma", addressed to the speaker's granddaughter, is a word-playing bit of advice on how to be one's self in face of pressures from peers and classmates, but it also serves as a dictum on how to insist on one's own poetic vision. And as Joyce Carol Oates has written of Slavitt, "he is his own man, his own poet."

There is also a section of "Translations, Imitations, and Caprices" which includes translations from Christian Morgenstern, Giacomo Leopardi, and Horace, as well as witty and downright fun ruminations on Pindar and others.

And then there's the religious meditations -- "Adam", "Paradise Lost: an Alternative Version", "Wonder Rabbi", "Invocation", and others. These are some of the finest in the book, as Slavitt is perfectly at home with religious material (due at least in part to his having translated much of the Bible, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and other ancient/religious texts).

In the final analysis, this is a book worth owning and revisiting. I recommend it highly for both lovers of poetry and the generally educated/interested reader.

Mr. Slavitt's self-serving and unevocative poems remind us of the worst kind of boys' club stasis in the universe of university poets. His Princetonian arrogance and pathetic fastidiousness to formal concerns veil a kind of poetry that isn't courageous enough to admit to its own solipsism. His poetry hides behind savvy meterical and musical concerns, but ultimately holds little for any hungry reader.

In the title poem, Slavitt asks the reader to take sympathetic interest in how tiresome his own literary fame has become. The call number PS 3569 .L3, "...spreads its way along the shelf / and is what I may someday call myself." It's unfortunate, I think, that this book has insinuated itself into the world of letters, and I should eagerly look forward to its evaporation.