In poems at once dauntless and thoughtful, Lisa Lewis reveals the unspoken thoughts, hidden fears, and secret desires of a contemporary woman. She reminisces about the lost joys of childhood ("I was one of those girls who grew up / Loving horses, but now I can't afford to ride. . . ."), writes movingly of her mother's last days in a nursing home, and offers a witty recap of a visit to old college friends ("They're good people, I just can't stand to be near them. . . ."). Stanley Plumly writes, "Rilke once said that poetry is one silence speaking to another silence. The poems in Silent Treatment seem anything but that--yet their large meditating presences live within a great still space, within a passionate need to speak and a palpable fear of not being heard. The longing in Lisa Lewis's poems is real not only in the full narrative argument of her lines but in the mindful ambivalence she feels about her body--its sexuality, mortality, earth-transcendence. It is as if she were trying to write her way into silence as well as finding her way from silence, and this is that poetry."
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Lewis's second book unrolls its large flat verse-paragraphs and monologues in clear, American language; the poems read like speeches or stories, essays or character sketchesAsome approximate journalistic transcripts, a few present unreliable narrators, others are almost parables. Her sad, straightforward lines evoke, at their best, Randall Jarrell's; more often they suggest such current work as Carl Dennis's or Stephen Dunn's, though Lewis comes closer to realist short fiction, with line breaks for emphasis, pace or convenience: "I was smoking/ A cigarette to hide it from my husband,/ I have to because I'm rebelling against him,.../ Making myself different" ("The Rescue"). The people who live in Lewis's plots can be heartwrenching within their stark limits, though their problems (prescription drugs, difficult husbands or friends, neuroses) can also turn predictable. Her best verse-essays display the travails of girls and women, and draw on experience with animals, as in "Girls Who Love Horses": "For girls who grow up loving horses,/ There is no hope. Nothing will break you/ Of lover for power, yet for small things, new-/ Born colts on stilt legs, you have a soft heart..." The same readers who find this National Poetry Series-winner (selected by Stanley Plumly) samey and flat when read cover to cover, may find it-dipped into, excerpted, in parts-insightful, appropriate, quietly moving.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
A former winner of Wisconsins Brittingham Prize for her first book (The Unbeliever), Lewis has had her second chosen by Stanley Plumy for this years National Poetry Series. And it is a distinctive volume, not so much for its style, which can be cumbersome and proselike, but for Lewiss relentlessly bitter vision, which seems a cynical pose. Her runaway ironies barely conceal her contempt for much of the world around her: the phoney people in their suburban homes (What House Are For); stupid young people for their follies in love (The Young); married friends content with children (Cross Country); andtake note those who would study with Lewis at Oklahoma State!her students in My Students, a bilious diatribe against their dumb apathy. Lewiss affectless voice can be casual to the point of passionless, even as she excoriates former lovers, self-absorbed friends, and men in general. No doubt the experiences described in Bogart, the narrative of her rape and the rapists eventual suicide, and Sexology, a chronicle of her wild youth, spliced with sex-manual blather focused on male pleasure, together explain her disgust. Lewiss false swagger in other poems betrays her sense of hopefulness elsewhereeven though she fails to save an earthworm (The Rescue) and a hummingbird (The Hummingbird)and the power she felt as a girl who loved horses. Without rhythm, and full of spacey thinking, Lewiss tough-talking poems rely on a bad-girl vocabulary, but fail to shock as intended. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Lisa Lewis's SILENT TREATMENT is a deeply feminist project.,
By A Customer
This review is from: Silent Treatment: Poems (National Poetry Series) (Paperback)
Lisa Lewis's SILENT TREATMENT, chosen by Stanley Plumly aswinner of the National Poetry Series, interrogates and celebrates witha humor so real that it surprises itself: ". . . If I tried to be funny/ I couldn't be drowsy anymore, though sometimes/ I wake myself laughing. A strange laugh . . ." (Morning Snowfall) Hers is a deeply feminist, which is to say human, project, uncertain, self-accusing, ironic, wakeful of Luce Irigaray's sense of "the horror of nothing to see." I am frankly appalled that one online reviewer characterizes her as "spacey" and further advises "those who would study" with her to "take note" In fact, Lewis may be the best medicine for the workshop poem. In "Sexology" she says, "My student asked, How do I say in a poem I cried all night? I said,/ You can't. You have to make the reader cry all night instead. I was wrong." After this typical workshop interaction: " I tell my students, Don't talk about tears in a poem. That's what I was taught,/ I accepted the implicit wisdom. I knew why poems can't talk about tears." Then later: "We talk about poems as an economy. You can't talk about tears as payment./ You can't earn them. You can't talk about what they're worth. They're not" The poem itself does not accept "the implicit wisdom," the very disruptive, converging form. These poems refuse easy pedantry. They are first of all questioning, daringly excessive, ranging from slang to song to vision. They humiliate the drive by review which characterizes their ironies as "runaway," their people as "phony . . . stupid . . . young." They do investigate assumptions, often about women, even by women, such as the character in "The Fine Arts" who is "ashamed/ Of what her body can do . . ." who has "no words . . . even to her husband, even when he's/ Lying beside her in bed, witnessing whatever/ Matters to him." These are poems which matter, which disrupt a particular online sensibility "where people/ Like to have certain things but don't like to go far to get them."
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excerpts from a longer review of Lewis's book,
By A Customer
This review is from: Silent Treatment: Poems (National Poetry Series) (Paperback)
Lisa Lewis's second book of poems,_Silent Treatment_, extends the belief-nonbelief conundrum at the heart of her previous collection. It also continues her earlier work of self-conscious and courageous reckoning with experience, body, and language. I've always been engaged by the mixing, in Lewis's poems, of near oracular grace with sometimes ungainly everyday speech; by her peculiar balancing of irony, tenderness, and self-deprecation with fierce. . .well, with fierce *crabbiness*. The speaker in these poems, though thoroughly self-scrutinizing, is also a resister, a veritable warrior. And one of the things she seems intent on battling is silence. By silence I mean an ontological space, free and clear of language and the mind; the infamous "outside" or "center" which we still argue with and about. And I mean also the social silence which protects an abuser, any silence that conceals hypocrisy or harm, and the one so often imposed on those with little power over what gets heard. I've always been struck by how Lewis can just *say* certain things in her work, however tabooed they may be. Nearly every poem, in fact, happily violates some unacknowledged, consensus-enforced gag order. Every piece shakes us awake, sometimes gently, sometimes not. She can say, for instance, that ". . .my students/Are stupid." In one sense, this is an astoundingly rude and crude acknowledgment of what every college teacher in America has surely (in at least one warranted or unwarranted, sacrilegious and punishable-by-death-or-loss-of-tenure moment of weariness and irritation), spoken or thought. "My students," she says, "[a]re stupid." But almost in the same instant in which the statement slams into the reader, it buzzes softly open with all its ironic over- and under-tones. It's an implicit and amusingly deadpan comment, for one thing, on our cherished but mostly unexamined view of teachers as angelic social martyrs. It's also an overtly provocative pronouncement that cannot help but bait someone -no doubt a student or two, no doubt a critic or two to battle, which, for Lewis, seems always preferrable to a life of submission; in this case, the grind of tenure-track teaching. And it's also overt finger-pointing, which, as it typically does in her work, rapidly results in the speaker's awareness of her *own* culpability: "I do what I can butnothing matters..."; "I wanted them to save the world"; "What they don't know is how pissed off I am/I can't just *be* them again,. . ." and so on. Admitting, after all, that one's students are stupid is inherently self-condemning, since it obviously suggests weakness on the part of the teacher. She can identify her strengths as well (she herself was a better student; she "only needed a little help, getting started") but she seems to feel that such strengths are mostly past, unrecoverable ("I can't just *be* them again"), and she is now helpless before the immense power of time, and the insidious glances of students who suspect their teacher is "full of s. . t." This is not a comfortable way to be. Lewis doesn't let anyone off the hook, least of all herself. So this is a poet intent on looking the world and herself dead-on. Her poems insist on the hard, terrible, sometimes ridiculous reality of an essentially material universe. . . They seek out and try to know or "nail" the awkward social moment, the sexual embarrassment, the difficult memory in all its corporeality -only to find those things, ultimately, unknowable and unsayable. A rape, for example, is not something which should ever be viewed as harmless or forgivable, especially, one would think, by a committed feminist (Lewis heads the Oklahoma chapter of NOW). In "Bogart," however, a description/nailing of such an event only leads to the revelation of its ambiguity and even, disturbingly, its possible harmlessness. (There are even moments of humor in the poem.) The rape is not, in the end, deemed funny or harmless, but the speaker does not arrive at such a conclusion easily. The process of writing poems, for her, is an affirmation of and engagement with *manners* (in Flannery O'Connor's sense of the word), even as she struggles with the *mystery* that very process unleashes. Language is a glass boat that keeps us above water, safe, bounded, and fixed while at the same time making present to us a vast, deadly, profoundly unfixed thing mere inches away making present, perhaps, the boat itself as that vast, deadly, profoundly unfixed thing. Or perhaps language in its practical and everyday functions creates the illusion of safety so that we may effectively be and act in the world--while language in its literary functions may reveal that illusion for what it is, reveal even the precariousness of language itself. (Literature as the antidote to language!) For this poet, however, a better metaphor than the glass boat is, of course, the horse. Where would any good warrior be, after all, without one?. . .Poems, like horses, were "invented to bring us back to earth." But if one is brought back close enough to, or confronts deeply enough, that earth (body/memory/love; burdensome everyday life), what seems to be encountered are intolerable contradictions, a profusion of opposites: indulgence in self/erasure of self; talk/silence; isolation/communion; oblivion/godhead, and so on. All things simultaneously resisted and sought-for by this doomed and persistent poet, so intent on *speaking* what the world actually is. . .Language freed of intent, while nonetheless still profoundly grounded in, and grounding, a particular body and life and grammar and readiness and necessity and suffering and *judgment*--such is the language of literature, or at least Lisa Lewis'brand of literature
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excerpts from a longer review of Lewis's book,
By Cindy Nichols (cinichol@prairie.nodak.edu) (Moorhead, MN) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Silent Treatment: Poems (National Poetry Series) (Paperback)
Lisa Lewis\222s second book of poems,_Silent Treatment_,extends the belief-nonbelief conundrum at the heart of her previouscollection. It also continues her earlier work of self-conscious and courageous reckoning with experience, body, and language. I\222ve always been engaged by the mixing, in Lewis\222s poems, of near oracular grace with sometimes ungainly everyday speech; by her peculiar balancing of irony, tenderness, and self-deprecation with fierce. . .well, with fierce *crabbiness*. The speaker in these poems, though thoroughly self-scrutinizing, is also a resister, a veritable warrior. And one of the things she seems intent on battling is silence, especially when it conceals hypocrisy or harm. I\222ve always been struck by how she can just *say* certain things in her work, however tabooed they may be. Nearly every poem, in fact, happily violates some unacknowledged,consensus-enforced gag order. Every piece shakes us awake, sometimes gently, sometimes not. She can say, for instance, that "my students/Are stupid." In one sense,this is an astoundingly rude and crude acknowledgment of what every college teacher in America has surely (in at least one warranted or unwarranted, sacrilegious and punishable-by-death-or-loss-of-tenure moment of weariness and irritation), spoken or thought. "My students," she says, "[a]re stupid." But almost in the same instant in which the statement slams into the reader, it buzzes softly open with all its ironic over-and under-tones. It\222s an implicit and amusingly deadpan comment, for one thing, on our cherished but mostly unexamined view of teachers as angelic social martyrs. It\222s also an overtly provocative pronouncement that cannot help but bait someone\227no doubt a student or two, no doubt a critic or two\227to battle, which, for Lewis, is always preferrable to a life of submission; in this case, the grind of tenure-track teaching. And it\222s also overt finger-pointing, which, as it typically does in her work, rapidly results in the speaker\222s awareness of her *own* culpability: "I do what I can but nothing matters..."; "I wanted them to save the world"; "What they don\222t know is how pissed off I am/I can\222t just *be* them again,. . ." and so on. Admitting, after all, that one\222s students are stupid is inherently self-condemning, since it obviously suggests incompetence on the part of the teacher, whose job it is to make students less stupid. She can identify her strengths as well (she herself was a better student; she "only needed a little help, getting started") but she seems to feel that such strengths are mostly past, unrecoverable ("I can\222t just *be* them again"), and she is now helpless before the immense power of time, the autonomous flow of events in her life, and the insidious glances of students who suspect their teacher is "full of s. . t." This is not a comfortable way to be. Lewis doesn\222t let anyone off the hook, least of all herself. So this is a poet intent on examining a flawed and brutal world--as well as her own complicity in that world--dead-on. Her poems insist on the hard, terrible, sometimes *ridiculous* reality of an essentially material universe. . . They seek out and try to know or "nail" the awkward social moment, the sexual embarrassment, the difficult memory in all its corporeality\227only to find those things,ultimately, unknowable and unsayable. A rape, for example, is not something which should ever be viewed as harmless or forgivable, especially, one would think, by a committed feminist (last I heard, Lewis heads the Oklahoma chapter of NOW.) In "Bogart," however, a description/nailing of such an event only leads to the revelation of its ambiguity and even, disturbingly, its possible harmlessness. (There are even moments of humor in the poem.) The rape is not, in the end, deemed funny or harmless, but the speaker does not arrive at such a conclusion easily. The process of writing poems, for her, is an affirmation of and engagement with *manners* (in Flannery O\222Connor\222s sense of the word), even as she struggles with the *mystery* that very process unleashes. Language is a glass boat that keeps us above water, safe, bounded, and fixed\227while at the same time making present to us a vast, deadly, profoundly unfixed thing mere inches away\227making present, perhaps, the boat itself as that vast, deadly, profoundly unfixed thing. Or perhaps language in its practical and everyday functions creates the illusion of safety so that we may effectively be and act in the world--while language in its literary functions may reveal that illusion for what it is,reveal even the precariousness of language itself. (Literature as the antidote to to language!) For this poet, however, a better metaphor than the glass boat is, of course, the horse. Where would any good warrior be, after all, without one?. . . Poems, like horses, were "invented to bring us back to earth". But if one is brought back close enough to, or confronts deeply enough, that earth (body/memory/love; burdensome everyday life), what seems to be encountered are intolerable contradictions, a profusion of opposites: indulgence in self/erasure of self; talk/silence; isolation/communion; oblivion/godhead, and so on. All things simultaneously resisted and sought-for by this doomed and persistent poet, so intent on *speaking* what the world actually is... Language freed of will and intentionality, while nonetheless still profoundly grounded in (and grounding) the particular human body and grammar and experience and readiness it requires for its very existence--such is the language of literature, or at least Lisa Lewis\222s brand of literature. It is what she says despite herself; it is what gets said despite language itself. Despite silence itself. It is what shakes both poet and reader awake to "sharply human woes." And it is this book of funny, frightening, wise and accomplished poems.
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