Unmentionables: Poems [Hardcover]

Beth Ann Fennelly (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 17, 2008

A new collection by a poet declared "one of the most exciting poets of her generation" (Harvard Review).

With elegant wordplay and her usual subversive wit, Beth Ann Fennelly explores the "unmentionable"—not only what is considered too bold but also what can't be said because words are insufficient. In sections of short narratives, she questions our everyday human foibles. Three longer sequences display her admirable reach and fierce intelligence: One, "The Kudzu Chronicles," is a rollicking piece about the transplanted weed. Another, "Bertha Morisot: Retrospective," conjures up a complex life portrait of the French impressionist painter. The third presents fifteen dream songs that virtually out-Berryman Berryman.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

A pretty babysitter’s boyfriend gives a young, nightgown-clad girl in her charge a ride on his motorcycle, thus igniting the wild heart of a poet. Or so Fennelly describes in a poem titled “When Did You Know You Wanted to Be a Writer?” Insouciant, sexy, funny, and dead-on, Fennelly crafts perfectly metered lines and quick-turn stanzas steeped in the blues and rock and roll in which she riffs on sights, sounds, and moments at once ordinary and suffused with implication. As in her fire-burst collection Tender Hooks (2004), motherhood is addressed with earthy directness, but Fennelly’s imagination runs rampant here as she writes with sass and purpose about the plague of kudzu, and the difference between cold and correct Illinois and hot and sly Mississippi. She also pays incisive tribute to the painter Berthe Morisot in a startlingly empathic series of concise and slashing poems, and to poet John Berryman in the complex “Dream Song Cycle.” A true pleasure to read, Fennelly is gloriously womanly, dancing-on-the-table daring, and supersmart. --Donna Seaman

Review

“Dramatic, complex . . . and enthralled with language . . . genuinely outstanding.” (Verse Daily )

“This collection is stunning in its technical range and in its emotional complexity.” (The Southern Register )

“A feast of light and sound.” (Paste ) --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 128 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (April 17, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393066053
• ISBN-13: 978-0393066050
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #761,691 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "No one guessed... no one ever guessed I swallowed brilliance.", April 10, 2008

By 

Luan Gaines "luansos" (Dana Point, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Unmentionables: Poems (Hardcover)

Fennelly is like a bright sparrow, ever-moving, garbed at times in colorful feathers of another species, at others content to perch and watch as life marches by.

Bemused by the easy memories of youth in America, the poet considers how drastically the world has changed, how our naiveté marks us targets, our adamant innocence begging to be taught real-world lessons, too long the cherished only child in a country where lack and pain grows more visible:

"Because of our bemused affection for our youthful cruelties.

It's still so hard
to accept that people who have never seen me would like to see me
dead. And you as well. Our fat babies. Our spoiled dogs.

And I, a girl at thirty-two, who likes to think she was a rebel...

what would they think of me, the terrorists
and terrified? Wouldn't they agree I've got it coming?"
(Cow Tipping)

A section is devoted to "Berthe Morisot: Retrospective", the poet slipping into the mind of a paint-stained artist saturated with light and shadow, insight and the infallible moment of creativity, of purpose:

"Degas, Renoir, Manet with his two-pronged beard-
go to the Café Guerbois.
Let them drink calvados

On their way home, let them look up from the cobbles
to where I've hung the yellow canvas
of my studio window
see
while you boys leapfrog in the alley
my light is burning"
(Berthe Morisot: Retrospective, Colorplate 13)

The years of such joy now past, the artist reminisces:

"Am I not yet that girl
who pried, in secret, the diamond
from Mama's hat pin?
No one guessed no one ever guessed
I swallowed brilliance,
nature's hardest substance scoring me."
(Berthe Morisot: Retrospective, Colorplate 70)

True to her heart and her inspiration, Fennelly returns to her source:

"Poems
you burn in the sink. Poems
that had to go and use
your name, never mind
that soon you'll be 16, hate
your name."
(People Ask What My Daughter Will Think of My Poems When She's 16

Tethered to the world by what she values, Fennelly soars through time, past and present, the many rooms of an imagination fueled by simple observations, profound realizations, an attempt to bridge two worlds, fanciful and real, to travel between them and with impunity, a seemingly easy feat for such a writer:

"I pumped my swing at six
so hard my sneakers toed the sky. You
know, don't you,
what happened next- after the swing set's stiff legs
rocked thrice- but before I hit the ground-
I flew."
(Say You Waved: A Dream Song Cycle)

In four sections, the poet unleashes the images of the imaginative journey blazing through the pages of this collection: "The Kudzu Chronicles"; Berthe Morisot: Retrospective"; and the series of Dream Songs. Her world expanded by an open heart and open mind, this poet never, never disappoints, always leaves me filled with the pure joy of language that expounds the boundaries of my experience. Luan Gaines/ 2008.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tries to speak of what can't be spoken with inspired and detailed lyrical verse, July 9, 2008

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Unmentionables: Poems (Hardcover)

The word "unmentionable" does not, strictly speaking, mean something that is inappropriate; it can also mean something that words can't describe well. "Unmentionables" is a poetry collection by experienced and prolific author Beth Ann Fennelly, who tries to speak of what can't be spoken with inspired and detailed lyrical verse. The result is an enlightening and entertaining reading experience. Community library poetry collections would do well in acquiring "Unmentionables". "Colorplate 68": Eugene worsens./ At fifty I am old./ I paint en plein air no more.// April: he gives me a bunch of violets./ I crush them/ onto my pallette,/ suture my canvas/ with violets.

3 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing, March 23, 2010

By 

Ms. Lady "Novel reader" (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Unmentionables: Poems (Paperback)

B.A.F.'s insistence on her "bad girl" girldom is unconvincing. Her lineation is slack; her jokes flat. Why does this poet receive rock-star blurbs for her airy, uninteresting poetics of (not much to confess) confession?