Customer Reviews

A Table of Content: Poems

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

After reading this I wonder now if Dorothea Tanning isn't possibly a better poet than she is an artist. I was unimpressed at first when I heard she had taken to poetry, but after reading this book, bought for me by an insistent friend who said, "If you like Barbara Guest's poetry, you will enjoy this as well," I guess I'm a convert, and you know what they say about converts. Is there something painterly about A TABLE OF CONTENT? The jacket copy says so, but oh, I don't know. She's certainly proficient with words and uses them like boomerangs, they flail about her head like the wings of green and red parrots. The poem, "No Palms," uses an unusual device--both lines in each of its couplets *begin" with the same word, and she pulls this off wonderfully; again, it was something I didn't think could be done, nor did I think Ms. Tanning would be the one to do it. Another device which would not ordinarily work is the way the poems are arranged, by alphabetical order, by title; usually a banal way of arranging work to divert thematic connections. Yet here those connections constantly appear and grow, vinelike, from page to page.

And finally her big gift is her voice itself, very different than that of Barbara Guest, a voice stripped of sophistication 9though not of wit). Tanning may be advanced in years, but a sweet innocence and youth blossoms in the exquisite lyric of her "I." "If it isn't too late," she writes, in 'Sequestrienne,' "let me waste one day away/ from my history./ Let me see without/ looking inside/ at broken glass." In these lines the idea of a 'looking glass' or mirror seems to float around the music of the verse without ever actually being mentioned.

Dorothea Tanning's debut collection of poems is a dazzling verbal display by a veteran visual artist, a valiant effort at staking a claim on the field of poetry. Commonly known as the oldest living surrealist painter, Tanning released in 2004, at the age of 94, her first book of poetry: A Table Of Content (Graywolf Press).

The book opens with the epigraph--"It's hard to be always the same person"--a quote by one of the best essayists in the world, Montaigne. Thus: one of Tanning's themes, or thesis, is identity, redefinition, or simply, change. Full of surfaces and artifices, her poems, deep down, evince erudition and experience and warmth. Looking at the table of contents one sees right away that the book is arranged in alphabetical order--the author is conscious of the fact that the book is her firstborn, her first foray into a new medium, one dealing with the English orthography. Which is to say, Tanning is making full use of the word abecedarian.

In the opening poem, "Are You?", Tanning poses some of the oldest questions in the literary tradition of the West--Why do we leave our home to embark on our various journeys? What qualities constitute an exile, an expatriate? Am I one?, the speaker asks:

...knowing that you always
tote your country around
with you, your roots,
a lump

like a soul that will never leave you
stranded in alien subsets of
yourself, or your wild
entire;

that being elsewhere packs a vertigo,
a tightrope side you cannot
pass up, another way
to show

how not to break your pretty neck
falling on skylights:
reward-laden
mirages;

then, yes.

The drifter accepts her lot; the poet agrees to the terms of her own making.

Born in 1910 and currently living in New York City, Dorothea Tanning is one of the oldest and finest of the contemporary American poets writing today. A Table Of Content is the latest collection of her work and will admirably serve to introduce her to a whole new generation of readers. Insomnia, My Cousin: Insomnia, my cousin/ you ride the night machine/witlessly in bedlam,/breathing on my screen/my panting outdoor movie,/my square root,/my flashbulb/socket-pinned and joyless.//Insomnia, my cousin,/you have sired nightly/indecent vertigo./I lie haggard as you drag/your insane engine past/across the floor,/slamming doors/on all my four dimensions,//leaving me high day/to shred the clotted dream./Cousin, I repeatedly/betray you with its debris.