Swirl [Paperback]

SUSAN MCCABE (Author)

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Susan McCabe is currently an assistant professor of modern and contemporary poetics at University of Southern California. She has published her poetry in numerous journals, including Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, Barrow Street, Fence, Volt and Sonora Review. Her first critical book, Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss, was published by Penn State Press in 1994. She is currently completing a book entitled Cinematic Modernism: The Embodied Poetry of Stein, W.C. Williams, H.D. and Marianne Moore.

Product Details

• Paperback: 64 pages
• Publisher: Red Hen Press (May 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1888996706
• ISBN-13: 978-1888996708
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.8 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,098,253 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Powerful Swirl of Words and Images, December 3, 2004

By 

Daniel Olivas (West Hills, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Swirl (Paperback)

Susan McCabe's "Swirl" is perfectly titled: each poem sends us into a powerful swirl of words and images. She be can disarming, too honest, with accusations spat out as in the beginning of "When the Shore Moved": "You're bumping anyway./ Facing out is about trying to./ Bandages worn without./ There's nothing more to spill is there." Notice she does not end this last sentence in a question mark though you would expect one. It is as if McCabe has no qualms about answering her queries all within one phrase. And her couplets! Listen: "The unswum pool lies still,/ olive cat sipping its reflection." And this: "By the time we stumbled out,/ the moon had lost its pompadour." McCabe is a remarkable poetic voice whose words dance, confuse and infuse. This is a beautiful, slender book.

5.0 out of 5 stars Enter the Swirl, April 13, 2011

By 

Spencer - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Swirl (Paperback)

THis volume is a must for anyone interested in lyric poetry--as it becomes more hybrid in the 21st century. The language radiates loss and longing (even the historical poem about the Hotel Adlon, shut down by Hitler), but each poem is a new form, an inventive syntax, and break into original explorations of being, gender, identity; these poems are acts of intense perception, both interior and exterior, especially how the two often overlap, mingle, coalesce---vibrate with playful, sad, and precise understanding: "Milk has limits," one poem declares, while others are out scouting and trespassing limits as with the Steinian "There is a Dislocation." "Cezanne's Doubt" is a portrait of the exacting artist, always moving towards his "ideal" and always feeling his/her limits, shaping a life that is itself an art" "It will take decades to get it right." There are also some great elegies here: "Towards Elegy," a long meditation on mother-loss; and "Sweet William," apparently a meditation on father-loss. "Isis" begins the book with its self-naming: "I am the bride of bits and pieces." Perhaps this best describes the love affair with the incomplete yet pressing demands of the unconscious and its convoluting processes. See also this poet's second book, starkly different, still dazzling: Descartes' Nightmare, winner of Agha Shahid Ali prize in 2008.