School Figures (Pitt Poetry Series) [Paperback]

Cathy Song (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Song (Frameless Windows, Squares of Light), a Yale Series of Younger Poets Award winner in 1982, writes in her third book about her family and her past. She conducts the music of her verse with great skill, offering her infant son's "ring of eight pearly teeth/ like beads on a rattle" and evoking students who disappear "in the broken shoes of the wind." Her most affecting poems concern family. In "A Conservative View" her mother's thrift is stunning. In "Sunworshippers" Song tells us, "We were not allowed to love ourselves too much." The passion of her understanding carries over to others. "All day I hear him," she writes in "Journey," a poem about her father's dying. And then: "Night whittles a sled of moon. Shavings of wood/ drift to the far/ corners of the room." Sometimes the poems read like prose broken into lines of verse, or too little tension informs a poem, so that its release brings a reader only slight satisfaction: in "Killing Time" Song steps back, in a reflection of frustration with her husband, to end, passively, with leaping "in shadows across the grass." In all, this is good work-that could risk more.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

In her third book, the marvelously named Song explores that endlessly complex terrain, the family, with delicate exactitude. She weeps over her willful daughter "ragged tears that tie me to her." She captures her Cantonese mother in sharp detail at a "dizzy luncheon" with her sisters and, much earlier, starved of anything but cabbage soup, so that she becomes comically parsimonious. This is a busy, full book, what with its uncles and grandpas and gossiping aunts. Neither woundedly angry at nor sentimentally accepting of her family and its heritage, Song explores the nuances of intimacy with admirable clarity and passion. Pat Monaghan --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press; 1 edition (November 22, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822955172
• ISBN-13: 978-0822955177
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,887,636 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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