Customer Reviews

The Woman in the Next Booth: Poems

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Finally, a book worth hanging onto. I've read this one before, but it's been long enough that I didn't remember whether I liked McDougall all that well, or whether the pack rat in me was holding onto this, so I took another spin through it. And I was holding onto it because it's good. McDougall writes short, to-the-point, and oftentimes very funny things that conceal the usual subjects of poetry-- pain, loss, existential crises. But it isn't often that they're presented with such good humor:

Coming Back, I Visit Myself

I knock twice on the door of the old apartment. A woman lets me in. My silver toiletries. My plants. My knife and fork and napkin. I look to see what has died or been given away but everything is here.

I say nothing. I am not supposed to say anything. I poke my head in the closet looking for the good green dress.

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Oftentimes it seems that the best poetry is created with unexpected juxtaposition, just as the best humor is, and one wonders at times why humor is not used as a device more often in poetry. And while I'd hesitate to go so far as to draw a comparison between McDougall, a relatively understated humorist, and Mel Brooks, it's certainly not out of the question. This is a fine little book, one which will remain on my shelves to be read again after enough time has passed that I have let the memory of the small pleasures contained herein blur, and I'll likely be just as pleasantly surprised again at how good a book this is.

"The Woman in the Next Booth" is the quietly feminist, subtly pungent work of a woman I labeled in a review some years ago as "the most underrated poet . . . in America."

Like the rain in the Delta she comes from, McDougall's poems sneak up on you, catch you unawares. Their effect can be chilling or warming, and surprising either way.

If there's something wrong with this collection, it's the title--taken, as such titles are, from a poem within. The title might spur in many men, even of literary bent, a sniff of disdain, and give the whiff of something "too" feminine for male notice. Wrong: These poems punch, even as they whisper.

I've heard McDougall read, and I've heard an audience literally gasp, collectively, at one or other of her lines. And I hear her voice in this collection.

As a writer, I aspire to her delicacy and power. And, as a linguist and teacher, I delight in the way McDougall herself delights in licking the syllables.

If you're not chronically postmodern or terminally hip and you think there's something worth reading for in Ciardi, Frost, Sandburg, or Eliot, pick up "The Woman in the Next Booth"--or, for that matter, any of McDougall's collections. It won't be the last you'll buy.