Trouble in Mind: Poems [Hardcover]

Lucie Brock-Broido (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 20, 2004

With Trouble in Mind, her long-awaited third collection, Lucie Brock-Broido has written her most exceptional poems to date. There is a new clarity to her work, a disquieting transparency, even in the midst of the wild thickets of language for which she is known. A poet “at the border of her own allegory,” Brock-Broido searches for a lexicon adequate to the extremities of experience–a quest that is as capricious as it is uncompromising. In the process, she reveals, unsparingly, things as they are. In “Pamphlet on Ravening” she recalls, “I was a hunger artist once, as well. / My bones had shone. / I had had rapture on my side.” The book is laced with sequences: haunted, odd self-portraits; a succession of poems provoked by discarded titles by Wallace Stevens; an intermittent series of fractured and beguiling lyrics that she variously refers to as fragments, leaflets, and apologues.

Trouble in Mind is a book that astonishes us afresh at the agility and the uncanny will of language, which Brock-Broido is not afraid to follow where it may lead her: “That the name of bliss is only in the diminishing / (As far as possible) of pain. That I had quit / The quiet velvet cult of it, / Yet trouble came.” Even trouble, in Brock-Broido’s idiom, becomes something resplendent.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Gorgeous and mournful, ornate and deeply felt, Brock-Broido's very much anticipated third volume follows up on The Master Letters (1995), whose highly wrought poems of love and self-abasement paid homage to Emily Dickinson (and many other literary precursors), and made Brock-Broido a center of attention among younger poets and critics, at least on the East Coast. Trouble combines the lyrical elaboration of that earlier volume with a direct and very affecting sadness. Many consider the death of the poet's parents: "First, my father died. Then my mother/ Died. My father died again"; "It is Thursday and I want to die/ Later." Brock-Broido, who directs the program in poetry at Columbia University's School of the Arts, puts raw grief within extravagant, elaborate language that counter-points Carol Muske-Dukes's recent Sparrow. One poem promises "The One Theme of Which Everything Else is a Variation"; others tour versions of Hell, evoke the dreadful hush of funereal vigils, or invoke memory's "factory/ Of slandering and fame." Butterflies, antique shepherds, hospital beds, Scottish weather, dire wolves and caravans (symbols throughout the book) track the poet's melancholic psyche: "The heart is a place made slippery/ As a minnow confused out// Of its school and caught": these poems confirm Brock-Broido as a poet who finds renewed languages for the recurrent dilemmas such hearts contain.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker

Brock-Broido populates her third volume of poems with such calamitous individuals as a Romanov child awaiting the Russian Revolution and a transient who committed suicide by entering a lion's den at the National Zoo. These tragic figures exist in counterpoint to the poet's confrontation of the deaths of parents and companions. She tempers the supernatural visitations and baroque lexicon that have characterized her earlier work with an affecting skepticism, emerging from a lengthy bedside vigil with the epiphany "I made no wish, save being / Merely magical. I am magical / No more." The elegy is a form that more pedestrian poets often taint with mawkishness, but in Brock-Broido's hands it yields great conceptual and syntactical variety.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 88 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1 edition (January 20, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400040833
• ISBN-13: 978-1400040834
• Product Dimensions: 9.9 x 6.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,029,854 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Sun promised, July 19, 2004

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Trouble in Mind: Poems (Hardcover)

Lucie Brock-Broido, who borrows her title from the black bluesters of the 1920s, and from the title of Alice Childress' history-making black drama of 1955 (the first Broadway play written by an African-American woman) shares with these black men and women the optimism of feeling that "the sun is gonna shine on my back door someday," even as dozens of gloomy things are called into being by the gorgeous language of her poetry. She is the mistress of Gothic suspense, which comes entangled in her enjambments like Rapunzel the thorns in her hair.

There are many fine poems in this volume, itself a convincing sequel to an earlier book "The Master Letters" which borrowed from Emily Dickinson in much the same way as the present book uses tropes of blackness, suffering and negritude. One of the best is "Morgue Near Heaven," a clever kind of literary form one could call a "pre-elegy." In "Morgue Near Heaven," the elderly poet Stanley Kunitz is given his proper due while he is still with us--though very old of course, and infirm. "I've never really seen/ A death mask of his face,/ /Because, techincally, he's never been/ That way, not yet." The small chill of those final words, "not yet" is worth waiting for, and there are promises to come. "Maybe I'll inherit all the Teutonic sentences/ He knows by heart, or all the same,/ The grammar of the night, the factory/ Of slandering and fame." It's a nice tribute to a distinguished mentor. (Kunitz, of course, wrote "Father and Son" and many other poems of note.)

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars great fyres of hope bot gretar frosts of feare--Wm Fowler, January 23, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Trouble in Mind: Poems (Hardcover)

It has been almost a decade since Lucie Brock-Broido's second book, The Master Letters, showed us the true meaning of Hunger and harrow and heartbreak, gorgeousness and glitter, "the odd marriage between hysteria & haiku." In this third collection, we glimpse again-always too briefly and exquisitely-that rare terrain, the Promised Land of (can you follow me?) oneiroticism. It is no coincidence that the cover of Trouble In Mind has zoomed in on the detail of The Dream of St. Ursula from Brock-Broido's first book: the poems in this collection are of the same world but magnified, intensified...we have the sense that we are closer than ever to Ever: "If you don't fathom that, then you should not be reading this." The whole book is apologue and aretalogy: the hero(ine) is born ("When, after many years, the raptor beak / Let loose of you // He dropped your tiny body / In the scarab-colored hollow // Of a carriage...); dies ("the halo that lit twice, // That lit and faltered, halted, lit / Once more, and then went out."); and is reborn ("numinous as a Petrarchan // Sunflower in the night"). Woven throughout is a sonnet sequence-more successful than any since at least J. D. McClatchy's "Kilim"-sung in the author's sinuous and sireny voice. The final apotheosis-in which Brock-Broido devours her past, consumes her previous lives' knowledge in a ravenous fire of a lyricism more lucid and fragrant and fractured than ever before-is devastating and profoundly beautiful.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book made me miss my subway stop, April 2, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Trouble in Mind: Poems (Hardcover)

As soon as I took this book out of its bag, I fell into a hypnotic world of haloes, feral horses, wheelchairs, madrigals, caravans & cabbages, all coexisting magically under "The North Star hanging/Like an umlaut over all of us". The poems are remarkable, simultaneously figurative and direct. Consider this rendering of parental demise: "First, my father died. Then my mother/Did. My father died again." Or, unrequited love: "I will go on loving as I love the backs/Of things and the invisible," This is Brock-Broido at her best-inventive, sensual, profound and sobering--but not sober. She ices her cake with sly sprinklings of humor: "We were preparing to miss our President and his/Long resplendent, minky hands"