Customer Reviews

Vinegar Bone (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

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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.

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.

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!