Customer Reviews

Sacrifice

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

 

 

Cecilia Woloch's _Sacrifice_ is a collection of poems centering on the bittersweet journeys in a person's life. She writes of the passions that keep us moving forward, and the struggles that keep us searching for meaning. The poems, in and of themselves, sparkle with clarity, and speak to us just underneath the surface of our consciousness.

Cecilia Woloch's first book makes me wonder where she's been for so long. Her work is new to me, but now her book ranks among my favorites. Why? Her poetry is vivid, emotionally honest and challenging, lyrical, and precise. She writes intensely and believably as daughter, wife/ex-wife, lover, friend. Her prose poems are surprisingly memorable, surprising because the prose poem is usually not my favorite vehicle for poetic expression. This is a book I now keep at my bedside: a good poem, A.R. Ammons once said, has an inexhaustible core of liveliness; these poems have that liveliness, so I know I'll not grow tired of them any time soon.

The poetry of Cecilia Woloch is beautiful and filled with the energy of emotion and craft. To follow her artful poetic journey is to feel the universal emotion of everywoman...and everyman. This book grips you. Read, weep, and enjoy.

If sacrifice is an act of offering something precious to a deity, as the epigraph to this book explains, the sacrifice here was the poet's act of creation. For the audience, it is reading the results, for consuming these poems is an act of discovery, not always about the poet, sometimes about oneself.

The poems are sinuous, supple, sensuous and chock full of mixed metaphors that turn and twist and generally come to some point sharpness that transcends the specifics of the poet's life and those characters that are or were part of it.

In "The Pick," Woloch turns a chore into a piece of high art, for example. Her father was "turning the backyard into terraces,/ breaking the hill into two flat plains." She took his power for granted, though it frightened her. She watched as "he swung the pick into the air," lowered it hard, "and changed the shape of the world,/ and changed the shape of the world again." Fathers can do that.

Occasionally there is a cliched poem that starts and ends weakly, but then comes a recovery, such as "Tin."

The poet "snagged against my love and married him for the ragged tin of his arms." The language again caresses the object of love, but then "the sparks of silver" seen from the corner of one's eyes when no one is there "are not hallucinations... but trails of light from one world to the next." She means to say, "I have given him up. That he got away."

Most of the poems, however, catch, and hold.

--Alyssa A. Lappen

I received this book for a present and after suffering through a half hour hoping to find something original enough to engage my interest, I simply gave up and returned the book. Not remotely recommendable.