The poems gathered here range from sardonic musings on the American obsession with money to a chilling dramatic monologue by a convicted sex offender. Oates is at the height of her powers here.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
This is Oates's eighth volume of poetry, yet her voice still lacks the readily identifiable features that make her one of America's most distinguished novelists. Her narrative poems are particularly prosaic, posing the question as to why Oates didn't write such poems as stories. Many of the best pieces recall the adolescent girl of the 1950s, mixing concrete memories?a family car ride ("Flirtation, July 1953"), the edgy teen-aged boy in "Sexy," the boy with his car, crayons?with less specific reflections on a sleepwalking child or impressions of the funeral of an infant cousin. The first two sections reflect and expand the volume's title, with an ironic hint of violence that pops up, for example, when a grandfather dangles the toddler over an open well. As autobiography recedes, so do craft and subject. Violence is more predominant: "He slammed me then I slammed him./ To turn the other cheek was great." There are some gems here, principally in the first two sections; other poems are banal.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Critics have given limited praise to Joyce Carol Oates's seven volumes of poems, perhaps because she doesn't treat poetry seriously enough for them. Her eighth collection will again disappoint those requiring formal, unflawed poetic craft. Oates transforms an album of painful dreams of childhood in upstate New York and "smokestacks, trashed autohulks, great American/ diesels" into a metaphor for "what we haven't known we've lost" in corporate, "wasted" society. Contemporary as street conversation, vivid as D.H. Lawrence (The Hostile Sun, her 1973 study of Lawrence, can be used as a guide to her work), she affirms Lawrence's "sweet acts of tenderness." Oates's best effects come from empathy for individual effort to achieve emotional wholeness. Tenderness is original, perceptive, and intensely personal. For all poetry readers.?Frank Allen, North Hampton Community Coll., Tannersville, Pa.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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More About the Author
Joyce Carol Oates is the author of more than 70 books, including novels, short story collections, poetry volumes, plays, essays, and criticism, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde. Among her many honors are the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction and the National Book Award. Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
I love JCO, but...,
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This review is from: Tenderness (Hardcover)
Joyce Carol Oates, Tenderness (Ontario Review Press, 1996)
While I'm a huge fan of Joyce Carol Oates' prose-- Cybele alone would have me singing her praises as one of America's finest living novelists, the rest is icing-- I've never been all that enamored with her poetry. Tenderness is an improvement over the volumes I've read to date, but honestly, not much of one. Every once in a while, she turns a good phrase or catches a really fine metaphor, but there's still a somewhat distressing lack of subtlety here, and when what little there is flies out the window, sometimes the resulting work is just painful to read: "It's an ordinary morning & an ordinary flight, even in my new skin that's a fact I must acknowledge! I've been here before, I meet myself returning swaying from the lavatory, I avoid my eyes! Through the pressurized cabin waft the usual psittacosis viruses, Bacillus leprae, airborne TB! Belted snug in Seat 2B my faceless companion reads Forbes, I am belted snug at 30,000 feat reading Scientific American! Must mark off universe into units of a certain length I am reading! Infinity with a geometric figure I am reading!" ("Frequent Flier II") Ouch. Three pages of this. (And, yes, every line that does not end with a question mark ends with an exclamation point. It's Tappy Tibbons afraid of flying.) I rush to point out that most of the book is not this bad. It's not great, mind you, but this, I suspect, is a nadir for Joyce Carol Oates writing in any form. The strongest pieces ("Like Walking to a Drug Store, When I Get Out"), not surprisingly, are those where she returns to the same ground she covers in her strongest novels--getting inside the heads of the damaged, the twisted. Unfortunately, there are far too few pieces of this ilk here; I suggest grabbing this from the library and reading them, rather than adding this to your collection. **
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