A second anthology of poetry by the author of A Jump Start explores a rich, emotionally charged world of meditations on love, myth, transformation, metamorphoses, sexual and social politics, and dislocation.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
James Lasdun coedited the After Ovid anthology-- in which contemporary poets put their personal spins on various passages from Ovid's Metamorphoses--so it's no surprise that his own poetry displays an Ovidean penchant for lightning-like transformation. Sometimes these metamorphoses are literal. In "Oxblood," for example, an ancient King Charles oak sickens, nearly dies, and finally undergoes a miraculous resurrection: "and like the stick / That blossomed when it stirred Medea's potion, / The tree burst into leaf again so thick / Its namesake could have hidden in its crown." Elsewhere, Lasdun pays heed to more fanciful quick-change acts. Take the policewoman he encounters in an elevator, who evokes
that supposedly arousing
Rebus of pain and desire, the uniformed woman,
Whether as Dietrich in epaulettes,
Or armored like Penthesileia, or in thigh boots
And cocked hat, straddling the Atlantic,
Fishing for campesinos
With live torpedoes...
With its rapid shifts in diction, casual wit, and intermingling of classics and camp (not to mention campesinos), the latter passage showcases at least a few of Lasdun's poetic strengths. But it takes a deeper immersion in Woman Police Officer in Elevator to get a sense of his linguistic agility and shape-shifting intelligence.
From Library Journal
In his second collection (following A Jump Start, Norton, 1989), the British-born Lasdun produces poems that may seem incredibly stilted to American ears, e.g., "you stand in the exfoliated green of your own past." Obscure classical references replace hard-won original imagery, e.g., "Pisano's virgin, or Berlusconi's belles." The volume's longest piece, a rhymed narrative bemoaning conservation-protected land turned into shopping malls and fast-food restaurants by a modern-day Erysichthon, does little more than trivialize its subject, presenting inanities such as the Iroquois woman who prays to "Demeter, Ishtar, Ceres." Such comic figures, in Lasdun's clumsy hands, are more appropriate to verse than poetry. Readers coming across this misplaced volume will be disappointed.?Rochelle Ratner, formerly Poetry Editor, "Soho Weekly News," New York
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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