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1.0 out of 5 stars
Just plain bad., November 1, 2007
This review is from: Scene of the Crime (Paperback)
Jane Ransom, Scene of the Crime (Story Line Press, 1997)
I have a thing for picking up poetry books. In short, I buy as many of them as I can, usually from authors I've never heard of before, because every once in a while I do that and I stumble upon something really, really brilliant. Random book-buying found me David St. John and Jordan Smith and Debra Allbery and forty or fifty others I could rattle off from the top of my head, all of whom are brilliant, all of whom I've read many, many times.
However, given random book-buying and the (very, very conservative) estimate that 90% of all poetry is bad, you can extrapolate to assume that in finding those fifty great authors, I've read four hundred fifty really, really awful books. The eye-bleeding, mind-wrenching trauma of reading Patrick MacKinnon or Sue Doro or, yes, Jane Ransom sometimes makes it seem that finding those great books just plain wasn't worth it.
Scene of the Crime reads like bad slam poetry, most of which isn't poetry at all, but more like performance rap.
"Little Jack Horner's thumb
leaves the pie for a bun, And Mother Goose says: wrong.
She's jealous. Jack's satisfied.
So's the bun, it being completely licked
from under his nail. It likes to be nailed,
that martyrish bun, as Jack fits the bun into his palm,
the hole in its head is the hole in his hand,
that martyrish Jack...."
("hot cross bun")
It's odd for me, of all people-- the person who believes sound is the ultimate virtue in poetry, and that Timothy Donnelly is the savior of modern literature, to criticize a book as being all style and no substance, so I'll clarify a little. Donnelly (Twenty-Seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit), even when he doesn't have anything to say (if that is ever the case), says it quite beautifully. It's poetry that works because the sounds coming out of your mouth when you read it aloud are a slick, sensual experience. It's obviously the work of someone who's in love with language. Ransom's work, on the other hand, wants desperately to convey substance, but it wants to do so using the lowest possible techniques-- thudding, obvious internal rhymes, repetition, rapid-fire delivery. Compare the above passage to an excerpt from Donnelly's "The Night Ship":
"Surrender to that vision and the labor apprehensible
as you take to the streets from the refuge of a chair
so emphatically comfortable even Lazarus himself
would have chosen to remain unrisen from its velvet,
baffling the messiah, His many onlookers muttering
awkwardly to themselves, downcast till a sudden
dust devil spirals in from the dunes..."
it's a whole different ballgame; in fact, it's not even in the same stadium. *
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