From Publishers Weekly
Most of the poems in Sholl's ( Rooms Overheard ) new collection focus on moments of high tension enacted amid the squalor of laundromats, burned-down houses and decaying boardwalks, with their prostitutes, abused children, derelicts and pimps. At one point she remembers, "My mother used to ask why I collected / such people . . . ," and the answer seems to be simply that she feels a bond of sympathy and understanding with the alienated and the down-and-out. The title poem, for instance, begins by linking the speaker's sexual desire to the "neon craving of a train." The red line, which stands for both the train route and her passion, leads to the observed image of a drunk "spitting onto the third rail . . . ," his saliva gleaming like the lurching movement of light on a train's window, which she compares in the final line to "a scorched rosary of light." Some of the images, however, remain undeveloped and unclear. This work follows a tradition of sorts--that of observations and meditations presented in the form of a private journal. Too often, unfortunately, the observations seem pat, as in the sweeping pronouncement: "What we love too easily betrays us."
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
"The Red Line would be worth reading for this honesty, an intensity and clarity of vision that can be the same as joy. . . . This is a greatly impressive collection, which recounts pain without pretending it can go away, without claiming there's nothing else." -- American Book Review
