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New Books - 06/04
Primer of the Obsolete by Diane Glancy ($14.95 Univ. of Mass.)
In her new
collection Ms. Glancy illuminates the mix of her Cherokee and white worlds
by retrieving "the primitiveness that was in my family. The roughness. The
texture of old voices." Inspired by an exhibit of work by self-taught
artists, she has written strange and vibrant poems -- some in a sort of
dialect -- that draw on the Bible, tribal beliefs, American history, and
contemporary American culture. "Here I am a little buffalo," she writes in
"The Buffalo at the No Wait Café," "wiping tables with my tail. It was the
only / job I could get what with my size. They killed so many of us."
The Raving Fortune by Noelle Kocot ($14.95 Four Way)
Ms. Kocot writes,
in a manner reminiscent of Frank O'Hara, careening, buoyant poems. "Live
wire/wild card, I hold you up, libational, / The dangling factor in a deep
velour equation,.." Her heart's on her sleeve, her joys and sadnesses are
ferocious and compelling, and she can write a quite elegant image. Sometimes
her work is unfathomably dense, but that's the worthwhile risk one takes in
such compulsive work. Included in this book are two exuberant sestinas, the
end words for one of which are rotisserie, gravity, corrupted, stars,
mission, and hoax. Ms. Kocot's work is unbridled and my, does it gallop.
So Quietly the Earth by David Lee ($15 Copper Canyon)
In a departure from
his much loved vernacular story poems, Mr. Lee's new collection offers
lyrical poems occupying and occupied with the desert Southwest. It's a
generous book, at 120 pages, with poems ranging from a series of two- to
four-line dialogues on the nature of desert reality ("Do you think the rocks
are listening to us? / I don't know. Do rocks hear? / The ones that are
alive do.") to a remarkable, long, multi-voiced meditation on western
Americans' vanities framed in the mind of a person up for an early morning
run through the desert. The book's opening poem, "Canyonlands Requiem,"
sets Mr. Lee's rich tone, ending, "Having only this remaining / as my
strength / now I lay me down these words / washed in the dreamshadows / of
hope, contradiction, and goodbye."
Generations by Pattiann Rogers ($18 Penguin)
"I am the heaven of
auguries." Indeed, Ms. Rogers' history of writing poems that meld the mortal
world with the immortal, the particular with the whole, gives her work the
sense of the seer. These new poems continue and expand her enchanting work.
For those of you unfamiliar with Ms. Rogers, she most often shuns the
first-person -- the quotation above ends a poem in which a monk slips from
monastery to evening star. She certainly sees eternity in a grain of sand,
and celebrates the imagination. In her poem "Oh Mother, Oh Father (I Dream
We Are Cats Beneath Falling Leaves In An Autumn Wind)," the leaves instantly
become "sailing bird skeletons.. / / within easy reach.. Even / the
cockeyed, off-key leaping / of the insane is rewarded." Her poems are
delightful to read, her vision is transporting.
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