Vinegar Bone (Wesleyan Poetry Series) [Paperback]

Martha Zweig (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0819563595 | ISBN-13: 978-0819563590 | Publication Date: April 22, 1999

A stellar debut collection of poems evokes the life of a woman in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This debut volume of tough, complex poems employs a unique blend of scary folktale imagery, American plain speech and a planed-down formalism in creating a indirect, cumulative portrait of a Vermont woman living alone in middle-age. Retrospective thoughts on marriage and raising a daughter provide the impetus for many of the poems, which then take off into the murky territory of self-reckoning. "Death of the Air" paradoxically begins hopefully: "Are we short spells in our heads, or what?/ Tired out chasing, selves bed down./ Wind lays snow in skeins around,/ Tugs and overlaps, nest-building./ All night the covered shells mend" and invites the sleeping town to "Dream courtships/ in moonskins." Poems about stars ("Here"; "Blue Light"; "Space Raptures") make this oldest of genres yield fresh existential terror and charge. "A Witch," "Immaterial" and "Questioning the Sex Killer" ("Anyway, he'd checked it out &/ it was what they'd suspected,/ women! ?women just/ opened & spilled") call on a second-wave feminist directness, and are infused with a capacious irony?and, elsewhere, eros?that undergirds the message. Like Alice Fulton (whose quirky phrases some lines recall), Zweig can be funny, as in the opening of "Sick Day": "Mama, I came down/ pup-sick among the bureaucrats!"?or of "Fidelity": "Little indeed to say about the sex part." This debut, unlike so many others, arrives with purpose, force and clarity.
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From Kirkus Reviews

paper 0-8195-6359-5 The debut volume of this Vermont-based poet frequently apostrophizes the both reader and the poet herself, giving warning in often cryptic little poems of sneaky death and the impermanence of things. Zweig affects a childlike voice and relies on a simple vocabulary for verse that flirts with nonsense; her cramped syntax and odd diction result in enigmatic poems that often turn the commonplace into objects of wonder and fear. At their hypnotic best, Zweigs poems break into song, fractured childrens ditties in which a bedtime kiss or night-time darkness provide no consolation. The poets antisentimental imagination resists putting the joy noise into words; for all her girlish surfaces and dreams of stars and moons, she lingers on harsher realities. As the title poem makes clear, even bones soften and rejoin man to woman, a relationship that provides little happiness throughout the volume. Sex may be the only way for children (No Child), but love seldom lasts (Percussive and Spooked). At the shore, in Fidelity, the speaker considers the best of love to be something not human at all. While the poet cannot console her own child, she also finds little guidance from her mother, who, after death, appears in her dreams as the Death Escort. More scary than sexy: frank and disillusioned verse that raids childrens songs and phrases to gather up its light surfaces. But Zweigs darker self finds hermetic wisdom in the language of stones and bones. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 71 pages
• Publisher: Wesleyan (April 22, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0819563595
• ISBN-13: 978-0819563590
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,244,759 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars disconnect, May 6, 2007

By 

Edna Lake "a lady prufrock" (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Vinegar Bone (Wesleyan Poetry Series) (Paperback)

There is something of Roethke's "The Lost Son" in these poems; Zweig's stylistic tics are kin to that piece, with their gnarled syntax, child-like strings of breathless run-ons and frequent use of hard rhymes that recall fragments of nursery songs. Something of Creeley lurks here, too, in the flurry of ampersands and jarring emjambments. However, Zweig's style stands between the poems' consciousness and the reader, and most of the poetry washes over without making much impact. Take lines like these from "Taking Her On": "Nobody trifles her business,/she does wild schism &/diametric, she kens &/savvies me senseless." Zweig's world, human and natural, is darkly threatening (again, like Roethke) but these poems, which too often recycle gestures and images, lack a will to connect.

5.0 out of 5 stars brilliant, fabulously unique, September 1, 2003

By 

I X Key "burningfield" (tomorrow) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Vinegar Bone (Wesleyan Poetry Series) (Paperback)

I am constantly delighted by Martha Zweig's resourceful, eccentric, bouncy music & her shining, rippling lexicon. She turns pathos into feast with each terse, taut, tuned poem, stanza, line, syllable. You know that you can trust your life in every move she makes. Thoroughly modern, quietly masterful, underappreciated to be sure, Martha Zweig is a great discovery.

4.0 out of 5 stars a voice like no other, January 28, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Vinegar Bone (Wesleyan Poetry Series) (Paperback)

Zweig's poems are full of startling deployments of language and rhythm. She makes lonesomeness, and loneness, into complicated and energetic matter. Hope there's more to come!