Next Life (Wesleyan Poetry) (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Once associated with the controversial, difficult 1970s and '80s group called Language Poets, Armantrout has more recently emerged into sustained critical acclaim: this ninth book (her second since the 2003 new and selected Veil) should see a breakthrough into wider attention. Armantrout's topics have not changed: emotional and philosophical skepticism; mysterious and haunting dreams—"the way sleep scrambles/ life's detritus"; the meanings and betrayals of words; and the frustrations and difficulties of communication in an all-too-consumerist culture. Nor have her instantly recognizable techniques altered much: short-lined, witty, taciturn stanzas ask why "Everything sparkles and/ then doesn't," or explore—in a poem that also describes the film Toy Story—the "gap/ ...where the soul/ was thought to live." Focused on small units—syllables, glimpses, ideas—the poems remind us how hard it is to even try to understand things for ourselves, how we can fight to resist the temptation to see society as it wants to be seen. Always smart, given to a sardonic humor, and surprisingly down-to-earth, Armantrout may confound readers who seek long, detailed stories or who want poems that give them clear hopes. Now that American popular culture accommodates so much disjunction, self-reference and irony, this could be the year when more readers discover Armantrout, too. (Feb.)
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Review

"Armantrout... has been writing... poems for 30 years, at first for a West Coast cult following, now for what should be a national audience... [These] poems give... the invention, the wit and the force of a mind that contests all assumptions as much as it can."--New York Times Book Review

"Once associated with the controversial, difficult 1970s and '80s group called Language Poets, Armantrout has more recently emerged into sustained critical acclaim: this ninth book should see a breakthrough into wider attention... Now that American popular culture accommodates so much disjunction, self-reference and irony, this could be the year when more readers discover Armantrout, too."--Publishers Weekly, starred review

"These poems are bravely self-conscious, as much about the writing process as the end result. This volume examines and questions the components of poetry, and appropriate maneuver for a poet hailed as one of the pioneers of Language poetry... Two of Armantrout's previous books of poetry were finalists for the PEN USA Award in Poetry. Her work has also appeared in numerous anthologies. She is a role model for future poetry rebels, insisting that poetry as an art form is as alive as ever."--Foreword

"Armantrout's lines...should be read out loud, so that the dissonance that is her genius can make its meaning heard."--Library Journal --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 88 pages
• Publisher: Wesleyan (February 19, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0819568201
• ISBN-13: 978-0819568205
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #851,296 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Next, April 27, 2007

By	Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

In the poems of NEXT LIFE, the natural world is taking a beating, not only from the rival attractions of the cinema and TV, but from the haste with which we have catapulted earth's slide into eco-catastrophe. From the very first poem, "Tease," to the last, we see the natural order made to feel second-rate, flowers turn into wallflowers. In "Tease," bare trees must be supplemented by their imagined resemblance to human skeletons to earn a place in the "provisional parts" of the world, while the poem works up a keen interest in a serial killer rapist movie--the eternal pair of cop versus serial killer. By the second poem, "Line," the speaker can no longer recall the origins of the term "rooting around."

Armantrout asserts that "Narrative prepares me/ to see/ whatever I see next," for one is always anticipating oneself, like the fellow Nicolas Cage plays in the new film NEXT--he can see everything two minutes into the future, thus it's hard to surprise him. In his case precognition itself foregrounds narrative's numinousness, to "produce a continuous present," as the poet reminds us in "As (2)." Three birds show up to stage a "framing gesture,/ / an inclusive sweep."

I have admired her writing for nearly 25 years, and last week I went to see her read from some of the poems in NEXT LIFE as she spoke on a bookstore panel here in San Francisco on "The Future of Poetry." It was the perfect topic for the theorist of NEXT LIFE, in which poetry's next two minutes seem always only as far away as the reach of one's hand. And she has a beautiful speaking voice too, her vowels pleasantly striated. If only I could have that voice of the operator eliminated from my phone system and have Rae Armantrout tell me that when I hear the tone, the time will be 10:49 a.m. and fifty seconds.

In the meantime her new book gives us flashes of another world, the chazzerai of this one, and I find it telling that so much of it comes from an attempted rehabilitation of the flora and fauna that, dried and etiolated, we are losing every day. "Dry, white frazzle/ in a blue vase" (cf Marlon Brando in A DRY WHITE SEASON) "beautiful--/ / a frozen swarm/ of incommensurate wishes." ["Close."]

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Rae Armantrout, succinct mistress of line, August 16, 2007

By	Ted Burke "Ted Burke" (San Diego) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Rae Armantrout is a poet of intensely private language whose seeming fragments of sentences, scenes and interior recollections still read vividly, provocatively.A member of the Language group of poets whose other members include Ron Silliman, Bob Perleman and Lynn Hejinian among other notables, she has distinguished herself from the frequently discursive style that interrogates the boundries between the nominal power of language and the contradictions that result when conventional meaning rubs against insoluable fact, Armantrout's poetry is brief, terser, more taciturn and pared to the essential terms and the sensations they conflate. More autobiographical, perhaps, more concerned with raising a sense of genuine autonomy from the words one employs to define direction and purpose, Armantrout's poetry is an on going inquiry about what lies beyond our expectations once they've been given the lie. As in this fine collection's title,what is the "Next Life"? What she leaves out is fully formed by its absence.

We wake up to an empty room
addressing itself in scare quotes.

"Happen" and "now"
have been smuggled out,

to arrive safely in the past tense.

We come home to a cat
made entirely of fish.
--"Reversible"

Where a good many poets lavish their subjects with an overflow of language that twists and turns and deliberately problematizes syntax to achieve effects that are more stunts than perception or even an interrogation of an elusive notion, Armantrout's poetry is strong, stoic, lean to the degree that what remains are the resonances of a personality witnessing the truth when internal idealism and material fact don't compliment each other. Armantrout's poetry is a cool voice intoning over the varied scraps and arcana of experience, and crisply discovers, underlines and
speaks with a curt irony. There are things we've said we were, there are the things we've become, and there are the words we first used to make our declarations asserted again, though mutated, altered, given a few shades of new meaning to meet the demands of a life that becomes more complicated with small, distracting matters. There's a blunted, occasionally jagged feeling to Armantrout's lines, a cadence that will alternate between the hard, acute image, the half-uttered phrases that seem like mumbles, and the juxtapositions of word and deed
that expose a archeology of deferred emotion.