From Publishers Weekly
Kinzie ( The Threshold of the Year ) virtually offers two books in this ample collection. The poems in the first half, "Seasons of Vietnam," are propelled by confident rhythms and her striking persona, the girlfriend of a naval officer who refused to serve in Vietnam. Descriptions of their relationship alternate with glimpses of Portsmouth, N. H., where he has been imprisoned; by turns lyrical and prosaic, the intensity of Kinzie's language sustains her theme even through the section's weaker efforts. The volume's second half, "Masked Women," is less specific in its referents. "He thrust aside her clothing. / He opened up her flesh, / Broke the nearby mirrors / And shattered all the glass," begins "Modern Love." Kinzie gracefully alludes to literature and art, adding a signature eloquence to the formal structures here.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
From Library Journal
Kinzie's poetry displays the learned allusiveness, formal structures, and imagistic density one associates with American academic verse of the mid-1950s. References to the Classics, painters, and foreign films abound, and in "The Chanticleer" the poet actually attempts to fuse memories of Count Basie with bits of Chaucer. Though individual lines can achieve a crystalline precision ("the landscape clear and miniature/ Like painting done on china"), more often the effect is somewhat thick and distant ("transitory emanations/ Precipitated from the laden sky as from excess of charge"). Even the Vietnam of the title is less a place, an event, a catalyst, than an evocation of a murky, dreamlike emotional state from which the narrator seems unable to awaken.
- Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
- Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
