Customer Reviews

Sakura Park: Poems

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I've been waiting for this collection to come out for some time based on the strength of pieces like "Love and Work" first featured in The New Yorker about five years ago and "On Leaving The Bachelorette Lunch" from Poetry a couple of years back. If you're reading this buyer's review then you're probably already aware of Wetzsteon's formal adroitness. She's a votary of Auden and she's inherited some of her master's huge empathy, self deprecation and erudition. But unlike, say, the later work of Auden, she wears her learning as lightly as a summmer dress(the seasons are a theme she goes back to again and again in these gorgeous urban pastorals). More than any poems I know, this collection depicts a negotiation between the need for privacy (creative space?) and the need for intimacy. The tension makes for first-rate lyric drama. Sometimes Sakura Park reads like Sex and The City for the intellectually adventurous, heck, the intellectually uninhibited. It's very much a hypereducated thirty something's sentimental education. There are references to Wittgenstein and Weil which are simultaneously funny, respectful and seamlessly integrated into their respective poems. Many pieces smack of seriousness and wit:

"There is an inner motor known as lust
that makes a man of learning walk a mile
to gratify his raging senses, while
the woman he can talk to gathers dust.

A chilling vision of the years ahead
invades my thoughts, and widens like a stain:
a barren dance card and a teeming brain,
a crowded bookcase and an empty bed. from "Love and Work"

These poems are a perpetual coming to terms that we're lucky to eavesdrop on. Like good movies? I don't know of any poet who has been able to internalize the sensibility of the Sturges/Hawks/Cukor screwball comedienne like Wetzsteon has. Pauline Kael would be proud. If I have one quibble with the persona behind most of the poems, it's the x factor of social class. The poems depict the universe of The Upper West Side aesthete with refulgent beauty. In fact, the poet uses the phrase "my city" in different pieces. One wishes the poet/flaneuse would train her gaze on some of the meaner streets Baudelaire or , god help us, Eliot evoke. That being said, this is her best book yet. "Evening News", "Dachsund" "But For The Grace" and "Love and Work" are great poems. You will find yourself going back to these and works just as sprightly for their playfulness and wisdom.

Sakura Park showcases Rachel Wetzsteon's poetic style and talent as she invites the reader to share in an emotional wealth of romantic insights with respect to the meaning of love, life, truth and beauty. Pemberley: The park was very large. We drove/for some time through a beautiful wood/until the wood ceased, and the house came into view./Inside were miniatures, small faces/we gawked at until a housekeeper showed us/the maste's finer portrait in an upper room./I dredged up a shaming moment:/you asked me a question, then ducked as I spewed/an idiot's vitriol, blindness disguised as rage./The house stood well on rising ground, and beneath its slopes the thirsty couples/held their glasses high at Cafe Can't Wait./ I spent time at its flimsy tables/but then I walked under trees whose leaves/exhaled gusty stories of good deeds;/I learned empty houses are excellent teachers;/I sent you away and felt you grow/tremendous sin your absence. Ask me again.

I love books but I have struggled to find poetry that I truly enjoy. Maybe Emily Dickinson. I don't have to make that effort with Rachel Wetzsteon's work. If you're thinking of owning one book of poetry, buy this one. The title poem still fascinates me and I've read countless times. It's not the only jewel in here. Great book!

Rachel Wetzsteon never disappoints. She has no bottom, no horizon, and no stellar limit. I always succumb to her enticing poetry. She makes time stop at every reading. One can only hope for many more volumes.