Customer Reviews

Veil: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

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Rae Armantrout has a secure foothold among academic readers, but her appeal seems not to have crossed to those of us in the wider population. I suspect this is not because of the so-called "difficulty" of her poems: Emily Dickinson is just as difficult and no less popular for it. Instead, I blame how folks write about her work.

Here is an excerpt from the poet Ron Silliman's foreward to Veil: "These poems return obsessively to this Wittgensteinian double bind: The objects and events of this world can never be experienced directly, absent all mediation." Now, this may be a perfectly astute description of Armantrout's style, but it doesn't exactly give me the confidence to believe that I can understand anything going on in this book. But I can! I can understand it, or some of it.

Look, you should read Armantrout--at least this selection of her poems. She'll show you something different than what she shows me; to be sure, she'll show us all something different, but you'll certainly see something (and probably not that Wittgensteinian bind that binds). She tinkers with cliché and psychology, and enjoys disrupting the way we think about meaning.

Here's her own explanation of what she does, taken (I hope permissibly) from the first stanze of her arresting "My Problem" (in Made To Seem (New American Poetry) and selected for Veil):

It is my responsibility
to squeeze
the present from the past
by demanding particulars.

When the dog is used
to represent the inner
man, I need to ask,
"What kind of dog is it?"

Raw Armantrout is a very exciting poet. In her poems she is constantly communicating such incredibly unique & gleaming thoughts. Her minimalistic style is so unlike anything else I've read.