Customer Reviews

Singing Yet: New and Selected Poems

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"All life/ has song..." Stan Rice announces at the start of "Singing Yet," chaotic collection of poems from his prior three releases, plus several new poems. Rice (who sadly passed away at the end of 2002) displayed a flair for evocative imagery, but his poetry is so confusingly random that it's almost impossible to decipher.

The first parts of the book are a tangle of bizarre eroticism (comparing melons to a woman) and odd morbidity ("It is death's/drizzle we write/checks on/when we die/we bounce"). But in the "Some Lamb" section, Rice delved into some deeper, more real turf: the death of his daughter from leukemia. "We stopped beside a hole where she/was put by men who could not see."

With an actual focus, Rice's poetry shifts into aching confusion, describing his daughter's illness, death, and burial, all the emotions that came with it. Unfortunately, Rice's poetry doesn't improve after that, including in the stretch of new material at the end of the book -- while his style mellows out a little, Rice's poems are still surreal and still nonsensical. "The iceplants/turn to the sun/their purple/sadist flowers..."

Dreamlike poetry and strange images are not a problem. But Rice's poetry goes beyond strange and into incomprehensible. "Golden silver copper silk/woe is water shocked by milk/heart attack, assassin cancer/who would think these bones such dancers?" he announced at one point. Okay, whatever. Maybe it's about death. Interpret that as you will. While his poetry can be intriguing and seductive, most of the time it just seems like cool phrases tossed randomly together.

Certainly Rice can't be faulted for his lack of description. He could evoke astoundingly weird, Dali-esque images. The problem is, they seem strung together like beads. Rather than focusing on one and exploring it, he seems just to have tossed them together randomly, assuming that they will see profound despite their lack of connection. "Thunder no more, sky/big sandwich gold & coral" -- it doesn't evoke anything by itself, and it seems completely disconnected from what comes after it.

An overview of Stan Rice's poetry, with a stretch of new material, "Singing Yet" doesn't shed any more light on what went through his head. Nor does it make his random poetry any more appealing.

Stan Rice's sardonic bitterness rivals even that of Eliot's 1922 masterpiece, "The Wasteland." This expansive volume of his work includes numerous examples of the extreme exhaustion and weariness of life that echoes throughout Rice's work. Poems like "Poem on Crawling into Bed: Bitterness" are exemplary of Rice's style, his bitter cynicism and his often-times harsh sarcasm. Also common to Rice's work is a rich imagery of animals, gods, and angels. But he uses these with a twist, and an often cynical one at that. He uses these images in an effort to understand the nature of humanity: where we've come from, where we are, and what we've done wrong. Rice's masterful use of language, metaphor, imagery, and unexpected rhyme make his work a pleasure to read, and his themes are universal ones that demand to be dealt with. Rice attacks these issues head-on with a harsh and bitter sense of consciousness.

Great, profound poetry of loss. The late Stan Rice was one of America's most brilliant writers.
The sections from SOME LAMB about his daughter's death will shake you.