An Impact

"As it happens, when what counts is the ethnic origins of authors and their message, poetry and literature is rendered banal. Such politically sanctioned art becomes instantaneously forgettable. Recently when I interviewed a group of English teenagers about the poets they had studied, I was told they were mainly exposed to what they called "random poets" whose names they could not remember. The only poem they could recall as having an impact on the imagination was Robert Browning's My Last Duchess. This is a poem that is totally irrelevant to 21st-century urban dwellers but for all that totally unforgettable. That's more than can be said about many of the poems included in The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry."

(Frank Furedi weighs in from Down Under, via The Australian)


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I am amazed at how many people continue to talk about this Penguin Anthology thing.


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I really need to learn patience.  I am such an Aries.


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The Beds

Martha Rhodes. Autumn House (www.autumnhouse.org), $14.95 trade paper (72p) ISBN 978-1-932870-53-4

Delivered with a disarming nonchalance, the poems of Rhodes’s fourth collection lock eyes with grief—at the dissolution of a marriage, the loss of a mind, the deaths of parents—and refuse to blink. “Easy to write hers. Loving Mother of Me,” says one poem’s speaker of the task of picking an inscription for her parents’ gravestones, “But for him—what? beyond his name/ and dates.” This kind of starkness, this quiet harshness, pushes poem after poem into a region somewhere far past conversation, but just before the place where there are no words. Caregiving is torture (“I brought to him the cups of tea/ he smashes across the room./ I brought to him the honey spoons/ he pasted on the wall”), while “Misery” (the title of one poem) is manifest everywhere because “I’ve died, or because you’ve broken/ your favorite wine glass, or lost your passport,/ or because you yourself are ill.” All of this pain is wound around a dark music, in which repetition must suffice for comfort, especially in a series of short, haunting nursery rhyme-like poems utilizing repeated lines: “I’m scared of frogs./ No Bermuda for me, nor ponds./ I’m scared of frogs./ They’re ugly. And creep up from bogs.” All beginnings in this book are merely preludes to endings, such as the new bed, “first purchase of my new life,” also the place “from which my soul may eventually, balloon-like, lift its string/ dangling from the ginkgo across the street while the rest/ of me is en route to my family’s welcoming plot in Sharon.” (Jan.)

(Martha Rhodes' new collection is out; review via Publisher's Weekly)


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Clue:  Warmer than expected....


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