You've Just Been Told: Poems [Hardcover]

Elizabeth Macklin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 2000

In this collection, an only child's responses to the faits accompli of childhood come to the mind of the adult in the presence of change and grief.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Elizabeth Macklin's moments of clarity--those elusive bubbles that pass across our line of vision and bring emotional realization into magnified focus--come in short, sharp bursts. As a result, reading her poetry can be exhausting, but in an addictive way, as though one is taking jagged, intoxicating gulps of pure oxygen. The poems in her second collection, You've Just Been Told, seem to split reality apart for the reader and zoom in on the "single thread in focus, the stranded intended / margin." Existence, she goes on to tell us in "Detail from a Large Work," is seen in the small "pieces of what / it wasn't." Pursuing these paradoxical fragments, Macklin expertly separates life from our nebulous understanding of it--and pulls off a similar trick in regard to memory and loss.

Much of the first section, "Grammars of Attention," is heavy with grief. Macklin often fends off pain with detachment: "On a day like this, when I have no paper / and look for scraps, the sun sets early. / It's black at five." Self-consciousness also turns out to be a handy anaesthetic, as in "Foolishly Halved, I See You":

The white-green wheel of a sliced lime
after a day: so naturally dry,
and so protective of all its remaining
juice. This is the quick thought so sly
of the classic survivor.

The past is relentlessly peered at and parsed. Yet Macklin is quick to admit that she's working with defective tools--i.e., language itself--and that "grammar / was a bad subject. It could always impale, / and repel, you with a concept."

The poems in the final section, "Persons Plural," are fittingly more inclusive of the reader: we're offered a chance at last to sneak in behind the poet's viewing lens. It feels as though grief has been moved to arm's length, and this extra distance offers a welcome respite. Yet we can't escape the close-up intensity of Macklin's gaze, even if (as she asserts in "Grace Cathedral Maze") such proximity has its own pitfalls: "Just thinking that we are close, in that poem, / moves us away." The correct focal length for meaning or melancholy is, of course, anybody's guess--but Macklin's attempts to find it leave us much the richer. --S. Ketchum

From Publishers Weekly

Macklin's poems, encountered frequently in the New Yorker, can often barely contain their delicious surface detail. "See. See?," "The Homeland" ("Flowering/ home-carved cherry heartwood") and "A Chance Small Fruit," lead us (as in the last) in wonderfully faux-na?ve adventures in synesthetic metaphor: "In the taste/ of this sour apple/ is the bee/ making pictures/ of honey." But what motivates Macklin's (A Woman Kneeling in the Big City) speaker to share these sensations is a kind of pathos to which many New Yorker readers obviously relate--the fear of the loss of agency, and of direct experience of the world, that can come with economic privilege. Thus, the book's title phrase turns out to be completed by "to move to/ Wolfe Island," a shabby-chic enclave with "a road with a name like/ Button Edge Road," yet a place that smacks of death, of "Whatever your choice was." "It is" firmly declares that "The sun should go down beyond/ a river.// That's what it does when I am home." Whatever their creator's origins, the leisured langour and worried precision of this book's speaker make her domestic vignettes read like eminently consumable lifestyle accessories. Quality and quantity-evaluations ("bright little words," "A hundred apologies"), fidgety suffixation ("granitic," "fixitic") and falsely epigrammatic endings ("I couldn't hold off--wait--wait/ to tell the truth. Now there isn't any.") can't draw attention away from the lack of correspondingly edgy insights. Such problems do not keep verse like "Students of Grammar" (recalling familial parsings), "The Lazy Girl Was Never Scolded" and others from being entertaining, but they reveal the work's limits, of which the poet seems aware. In "Detail from the Large Work," the search for a way out of the poetry of connoisseurship turns up as a theme, whereby thick description of a cropped artwork yields an elided main subject: "That's how we missed whole houses burning." One hopes she won't miss them the next time. (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 112 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition (May 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393048675
• ISBN-13: 978-0393048674
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,060,262 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Elizabeth Macklin is an amazing poet, July 13, 2001

By 

Jennifer A. Johnson "jabbl" (St. George, UT USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: You've Just Been Told: Poems (Hardcover)

I first read Macklin's poetry in issues of the New Yorker about 10 years ago. I was impressed by her use of emotionally-laden language while keeping the poem perfectly grounded and vivid. Her work is sharp and graceful and absolutely lovely.

'One time I sat down / on the steps of a ladder, holding a cup of black / coffee that nearly woke the world...'

This particular collection has many of my favorite Macklin poems: "Foolishly Halved, I See You," "Given The Questions," and "You've Just Been Told."

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Confusing but Excellent, March 30, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: You've Just Been Told: Poems (Hardcover)

The reason I had to read this book was for a school poetry project. I had to write many explications on Elizabeth Macklin's poems, and it was a long and confusing process. I enjoyed her book greatly, and if you like poetry, Macklin is someone to consider reading.