TUMBLE DRY LOW • writing • reading •poetry

poetry • publications • reading
fiction • poetry • non-fiction

Wallace Stevens, Harmonium
I love Wallace Stevens' creative titling that forces his poem to shine in a new light. I love his concrete detailing of his imaginative landscape. I love his pleasure in language. At times, I wish his poems were more anchored to the grittiness of this world. His best poems, the ones I connect most with, are – but at times, he seems to float away to another universe, where I can’t see a connection between my world and his. (1/05)

Larissa Szporluk, Isolato
This is my second or third time reading this book, and sometime in me wants to read it again, and again. It's one of my favorite books of poetry: mythic, symbolic, dreamy, full of mystery, voices, rich language, emotion -- the same reasons I loved Trouble in Mind (Lucie Brock-Broido's latest poetry book). Unlike with Wallace Stevens, even when Szporluk takes us to the moon, or has us following deer crossing the sea, I can feel what the poems are feeling, something very human, at this very intimate level. There's so many poems in this book that I love, but one of my favorites, that haunts me: a retelling of the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme, but this time it's about a husband who had seduced a younger woman. A disturbing and devastating poem. (1/05)

Rita Dove, Thomas and Beulah
I wanted to read a few book-length poem narratives—in this case, there’s two narratives telling the same story, told by Thomas and told by Beulah, who are husband and wife. Thomas is haunted, while Beulah is the dreamer, and the book begins brilliantly by a cause for a haunting (Thomas watches his friend drown in the Mississippi, partially his fault). The central relationship with Thomas seems with his own drowned friend Lem, not with his wife Beulah, which is perhaps one of the causes of Beulah’s isolation and active dream-life. Very few poems of joy – I especially loved Beulah’s voice, how she transformed reality into her own dream world, even on her death bed. The writing is crisp, exacting, the wording ordinary but because of its precision lyrical and emotionally full (reminding me many times of Louise Gluck, but with more metaphors). (11/04)