Some Things Words Can Do [Includes A History of Small Life on a Windy Planet, orig. pub. in 1993] [Paperback]

Martha Collins (Author)

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6 x 9 trim. LC 98-42844

Product Details

• Paperback: 131 pages
• Publisher: Sheep Meadow; 1st edition (October 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1878818740
• ISBN-13: 978-1878818744
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,656,208 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "something that will not/ without an effort be moved", February 25, 2005

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Ivy Kleinbart (Geneva, NY) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Some Things Words Can Do [Includes A History of Small Life on a Windy Planet, orig. pub. in 1993] (Paperback)

Politically charged and transgressive, Martha Collins' poems take on the risky themes of domestic violence, social repression, political deception and war, in Some Things Words Can Do. From the first poem in the book ("Pinks," a reflection on racial categorization) we see immediately what words are up against: they must penetrate and revise deeply sedimented patterns of suppression and subjugation that continue to affect social structures at every circumference (family, community, nation, world). At times, Collins' language operates quietly, such as when the speaker in "Lies" asks one of the most central questions in the book: "If we don't know,/ do we lie if we say? If we don't say, do we lie/ down on the job?" There are also flashes of shock and discomfort throughout: confrontations with victims and corpses, all of them strange, and at the same time startlingly reminiscent of one's own body. In "Little Boy," for instance, we peer into the flesh-peeled faces of the victims of American "wargasm" to witness military aggression as an atrocious yet largely unquestioned part of living in the 20th Century. In "Her Mother Said," we are asked to swallow (along with our "chicken marsala, rice... [and] wine") an excruciatingly detailed description of a young girl's murder.

Collins' interest in what words can do clearly extends beyond playful accidents and intersections of sound and meaning; her words perform, invite, test, and testify. She manages a wide range of perspectives, experimenting with different personae and points of view, as in "Likes," a poem that questions traditional gender roles and stereotypes: "beneath my dress my hands were his were find-/ ing me no her no him no both of us like/ he was she and I was he and we and they/ were both in both of us two like to like." She keeps her lexicon simple, preferring an investigation of meanings, double-meanings and syntactical twists, to abstruse and exclusive diction. Challenging assumptions without estranging anyone, Martha Collins absorbs and engages her audience, the way "the earth absorbs/ the forest, the water/ absorbs the stone."

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Play leads the way, February 20, 2005

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Tuor (Ithaca, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Some Things Words Can Do [Includes A History of Small Life on a Windy Planet, orig. pub. in 1993] (Paperback)

Normally one expects linguistic play not only as the technique but also as the focus of LANGUAGE-canted poets, but in this book Martha Collins is after fleshier referential game. There's play, some of it for play's sake ("Cloud-Play for Four Hands"), but much of it opens onto raw vistas, exposing the seriousness inherent in (mis)using language ("Testimony", "Background/Information", "Little Boy"), or the ways in which language can circle around violence and interpersonal terrors (of racism, war, mutilation, rape). Collins's language circles inversely, not to conceal these subjects, but to outline their ugly inner contours. Many poems in the first and third sections of the first book (this volume actually includes two books: "Some Things Words Can Do" and "A History of Small Life on a Windy Planet"), and many in the second book, seem to batter language around playfully (as the sonnet section of the first book does), but turn suddenly, unexpectedly, worming into political or social problems like a power awl. They remain wonderfully non-preachy, however; violence, deception, greed, and the brute drive to power argue, as always, most eloquently against themselves when they stand naked.

Collins is able to reel incredible webs out of words ("Pinks", "Cuts", her "sonnets" titled with single focus words) with a compressed vitality that makes her formulations seem, after the fact, obvious, yet unexhausted. There is a decided lack of cognitive distance from the process; rather, an involving warmth and humor leaps down every page, sometimes stinging ("Middle") but never without purpose, and never to an off-putting degree. Watching her at work is like watching someone crack open an egg over a frying pan: El Dorado slips out instead, on fire and being bombed, the fragmenting glitter testimony to human insanity, human (and natural) beauty, and, somehow, the usefulness of eggs.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars your body haunted by syntax, February 24, 2005

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[d]awn lonsinger - See all my reviews

This review is from: Some Things Words Can Do [Includes A History of Small Life on a Windy Planet, orig. pub. in 1993] (Paperback)

You will feel as if you are tracking words through a forest, that the light by which you see is also words, that if you tail long enough the whole forest will flash its linguistic underparts, and you yourself will suddenly emerge as terminology, your body haunted by syntax, your soul swathed in significance, your viscera wet. The title of this book is accurate, for inside you will find yourself titillated by the clout and valence of language, of how we use it to manipulate (stage-manage) and are manipulated (moved/moved about), and even formed, by it ("We rend, undo, blather still"). Collins' work is daringly and unapologetically political, which, in a world (at a time) so sewn with the difficult sutures of politics, is refreshingly necessarily blunt ("You can take a country out but you / can't put it back in again, you can't / burn all the books, unlearn the words.").

She reminds us that language itself is political, subjugates, negates, constructs. And yet while dealing frankly with the inconvenient facts of our times, these poems are also innovative, subtle, textured, at times seductive even ("the daisies / are blooming their heads off"). There are traces of Dickinson ("Knife, sword, gun, we meet at some / point or other, yours, you designate, I'm point- / less, zero, blank ... Zero and one are all the machine / knows.") and Stein ("Mean to mean is one thought. Mean / time the apparent sun sheds light on things. / Apparent things: seeing meaning seeming / things. Marrying means to mean. I mean it. I do.") throughout, but always with a Collins' colander, a screen that sifts through connotation's flour / flower / flow-err ("I didn't, well, a paper / I wrote, I was seventeen, oh the mind's a swamp / with the color drained, like photographs, black / and white, like words on a page, mistakes erased, / And where did you get your evidence?").