Customer Reviews

Smokes

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Wheeler is one of the really fascinating voices in contemporary poetry. Avoiding the sentimentality and clumsiness of most American lyric poetry, she heads off instead toward poems that combine the virtuosity of early modernism with a fair share of post-modern fun. Notwithstanding the experimental flair, tho, these poems are accessible and full of bemusement and yearning. Anybody who likes this book should check out the just-published SOURCE CODES, too. It's even better.

This book depressed me greatly. It proves to this reader that the academy has taken over. This book is impenetrable, verbose, and cold. Susan Wheeler is the type of poet who is always saying, 'Hey look at me, look at how clever I am.' The work is empty of humanity. It is the kind of poetry that graduate students on so-called writing programs spend days discussing what they actually signify. It is poetry for the academic elites who jet from one writing program to another. The reader who believes poetry to be more than shallow verbal pyrotechnics will be disappointed by this book.

Who reads this stuff? The mind boggles.

Wheeler's poems tantalize, provoke, inspire and mystify. And, ultimately, they delight. Absorb them silently, and then read them aloud. These aren't for the fainthearted or the pedantic. Like great wine, the work has a glorious finish with nuances to savor long after you've put it down. Not like so much of the other plonk that's out there.

Susan Wheeler writes intelligent and playful poems. Former poet laureate Robert Haas, who selected this book for publication, says that "Smokes" is a "deeply literary book." I agree. It's like Wheeler is having a conversation with the whole history of poetry: Pound, Mallarmé, Hesiod, John Berryman. And yet there are poems called "Beavis' Day Off" and "Fractured Fairy Tale," so Wheeler is also in tune with our present culture. A unique mind engaged with many worlds. And take a look at the rhymefest "Shanked on the Red Bed"--a classic! Wheeler's poems delight and haunt.