What Silence Equals: Poems [Paperback]

Tory Dent (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The subject of Dent's admittedly autobiographical first collection is intriguing: these are the poems of a woman suffering from AIDS. While several books have appeared from the male perspective and women have contributed poems to anthologies, this ought to be a landmark volume. Such weight only makes the book's shortcomings more disastrous. Emotion is barely detectable. Dent's long lines are chopped-up prose, and even as prose they'd be boring: "So the ignorant stumbled out of bliss as stockbrokers did in '29 / their limbs wriggling the way a spider descends / into a void of volition. . . ." Even poems written to such tunes as Jimmy Cliff's "Many Rivers to Cross" or Percy Sledge's "At the Dark End of the Street" bear no traces of lyricism. Imagery is sparse and predictable: eyes "sparkle like zircon diamonds," clouds are "tearful," lips are "zipped together." Large words are thrown in seemingly to no other purpose than to prove the poet's superiority to her readers: "noyade," "mullocky," "metalanguage," "apheliotropically." Inverted grammar lends a stilted quality. An attenuated introduction by Sharon Olds ( The Father ) does little more than quote from the book itself.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

It may be a disservice to say this poet writes about AIDS--a topic that can subsume the artistic endeavor--but Dent seems to thrive on difficulty. These poems are intelligent and alive, emanating not from what the author terms "the negative state of my positiveness" but from the vertiginous cavern's edge: they are not poems about a disease but weather reports from an existential state. A mostly unrhymed hexameter line allows her to move from ballade to song lyric to satire without rupturing the book's texture. Bitter, bawdy, and sad, recalling the verse of medieval outlaw poet Francois Villon, to whom the title poem is dedicated, these are, unmistakably, love poems of our time: "the way the gross anatomy of lovemaking gives way to its interiority,/ bends supple as if broken already beneath the weighty implosion." A brilliant and challenging first collection in which the writing only occasionally spins out of control.
- Ellen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Lib., New York
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: Persea (October 19, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0892551968
• ISBN-13: 978-0892551965
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,439,518 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Powerful, compelling and corruscating work, August 27, 1999

By 

David Shapiro (Riverdale, NYC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: What Silence Equals: Poems (Paperback)

This is one of the most important volumes of poetry in our time. I have been dazzled by the bravery and the intimacy of this great poetry. Like a contemporary Dostoevsky stood up against a wall for execution and even more excruciatingly pardoned, for a time, this young woman has created a poetry pof survival and p[ersistence and pluck that puts her elders to shame. A true shame. Who has written, iun the last decade, any poem as powerful as her Jade or as Poem for a Poem? She has taken the hedonism and whimsy of the New York Schpool and strangled it severely. Though shre has suffered, she has created, like Ginsberg, a poetry of comradely love and blistering vision. She has given us a book of this era, fresh as a snapshot, elongated as a dirge. We all look forward to her continued courage; we look forward to her next book, like a letter that we hardly deserve. This is a poet who has dealt with an infinite burden, with the virogorous wit of a revolutionary.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Some reviews of What Silence Equals, September 22, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: What Silence Equals: Poems (Paperback)

I'm a friend of the author and wanted to share some reviews of the book:

"There has never been a poetry quite like this before, so passionately and understandably barbaric...and, withal, stormily beautiful, at the border where beauty tolerates the sublime." --- Calvin Bedient, Parnassus

"Magnificently intricate...Tory Dent's book of poems is about much more than AIDS. This is a complex, bold work not afraid to be cerebral (makes your brain sweat)... that challenges the way this disease -- born of, surrounded and perpetuated by silence -- is represented" -- Gabrielle Glancy, Poetry Flash

"Some of the most exciting new verse anyone's written in a very long time. We are reading the construction of a life force in all its glory...the bigness of her imagery is matched by an emotional gigantism throughout that sustains the immensity of the threat she's experiencing." -- Eileen Myles, Denver Quarterly

"Verbosity and passion mark Dent's collection of poems. The poems roll out of their language and rhythms, and what seems to matter is that rolling force...it's a language machine. These poems follow the criss-crossing path over the line dividing life and death. Dante may be the closest analogue since he, like this speaker, had a guide and spoke of a personal crisis...yet this guide knows no more than the poet...this guide offers no consolation." -- Nora Mitchell and Emily Skoler, New England Review