5.0 out of 5 stars
A Master at Work, August 30, 2006
This review is from: The Revenge by Love (Paperback)
Although often lumped with the so-called expansive poets (encompassing both new formalism and the new narrative), Dooley's work bears only superficial resemblance to the poems of these writers. One will scan The Revenge by Love in vain for iambic pentameter or rhyme schemes; instead, one will find predominantly long-lined free verse narratives and monologues, prose poems, and even brief haiku-like poems. Dooley's references, also, are not as exclusively popular as those employed by many of the expansive poets, nor are his subjects as urban, nor his stance as urbane, though he is as comfortable writing about the French composer Camille Saint-Saens as about a rural mother who has lost her son to AIDS. Regardless of subject, Dooley withholds judgment, presenting enough detail to allow us to reach our own judgments about his characters, who, like their flesh-and-blood counterparts are an infuriating mix of the admirable and the inane. In "Zoramel," for instance, Dooley narrates the predicament of a student writer who has slept with his mentor's student girlfriend. Through the lens of the student's projected but, notably, unwritten fantasy novel set on the planet Zoramel, Dooley explores the student's confused feelings of guilt, denial, projection, and rationalization. In the end, we can neither condemn the student too harshly nor extend unqualified sympathy to the morose mentor.
Humor occupies a prominent place in Dooley's poetic toolbox, from the wry suggestiveness of "Politics," in which a speaker reminiscent of Gore Vidal flirts with a young man under the guise of discussing his aborted political career, to the broader humor of "Dirt," a dramatic monologue whose apparent subject is the speaker's childhood and very messy friend; as with "Politics," however, the true subject, emerging from subtext, is seduction. Similarly, "A Little Hunger" explores a woman's rationalizations surrounding her diet as she thinks about her boyfriend, conflating the pleasures in ways that reveal much about her character:
She hadn't wanted to marry anyone
before law school and in law school who had time
to do anything but order in pizza and read cases? Mushrooms
and pepperoni with extra cheese. Yum. At work
she could exist on microwave popcorn (unsalted,
unbuttered, as much as she wanted) and diet Pepsi.
Eric said he loved her figure, which was sweet, but
did anyone really love cellulite thighs?
As elsewhere in the volume, the humor does not exist to elicit a chuckle but to illuminate character and situation and to leaven the underlying pain.
The sequence "O'Keeffe and Steiglitz," which probes the relationship of the painter and photographer through poetic vignettes, comprises the second section of the book and marks Dooley's greatest accomplishment to date. Here, humor, objectivity, and facility with various forms allows Dooley to create fragments from which we can infer a greater whole. One of the strongest of these pieces is the prose poem, "Lake George at Winter," which evokes the wind-swept cinematography of Doctor Zhivago as it presents O'Keeffe's romance with poet and novelist Jean Toomer:
Deep snow drifted around the farmhouse. The world seemed exceedingly pure, dazzlingly bright. They drove the Model T onto the surface of the ice and walked on the wide, glowing expanse till the bitter wind forced them back. Bits of dark green, ranges of brown, and white, white. Cerulean sky. Their breath carried their words out onto the wind. When she grew cold, he took one hand in each of his and rubbed them against each other. The ice could bear so much weight, themselves and the car made no impression. The day was blown glass of finest Venetian work. She showed him her favorite birch.
The implicit distancing of the prose poem allows Dooley to render their passion without falling into mere sentimentality; the details accumulate with the force of metaphor.
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