Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In her latest collection, Notley takes a step back from the body of work she has amassed over the last three decades (The Descent of Alette; Selected Poems; etc.) to compose a kind of quasi-autobiography in verse. Casual, forthright and perceptive, it is a culminating effort. Notley, as is her style, rarely shies away from unabashed, almost Whitmanesque generalizations, and here her bravery pays off. Again and again, she asks herself what poetry in America is and was, turning moments later to provide her own answers: "...`So little/ tenderness in American poetry' as/ Robert Duncan once told meÄwho was he?/ Who was anyone? unstarred brightest equality." Contemporary poetry's recent past shadows Notley more closely and intimately than most: her late husband, the poet Ted Berrigan, commands a small but devoted following, and many of these poems try to make sense of his work and his early death ("Grief's not a social invention./ Grief is visible, substantial, I've literally seen it") while retaining a sense of her own trajectory ("The Subject/ of this poem is not how a woman's imagination/ may be dominated by a man's"). We follow her in a loose chronology from a West Coast childhood to New York City, first as a pre-feminism college student, then as a 1970s East Village poet in a scene full of humid friendships, wordsmithery and pill-taking, and through to Paris, where she lives today. Occasionally, Notley slips into the automatic writing-like phrases and personal myth-making that was the Achilles' Heel of the late New York School. But even these moments, with their rock 'n' roll bio shading, make for compelling reading. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
With some 20 books of poetry to her credit, Notley (The Descent of Alette, 1996, etc.) continues to combine Beat blather and New York School patter in her sprawling, self-mythologizing verse; her long, un-punctuated lines rehearses the key events in her life: growing up in Needles, California; coming east to college; meeting her husband, the poet Ted Berrigan, at Univ. of Iowa; and following him to his Lower East Side haunts, where they not only become speed freaks, but also have two children before Berrigan dies young of liver disease. The mostly realist but occasionally off-the-wall narratives, with their wild surreal flourishes, follow the poet chronologically as she uses words to cure the tameness she bemoans among the squares. Proving her bohemianism, she uses lots of dirty words, and writes of sex, but her radical feminist self makes sure theres nothing sexy in all the vulgarity. Notleys tough postures include herself as true poet who hates Iowa City (too boring and full of assholes), where everyones an academic poetry/groupie, and the women offer themselves to the visiting stars. Notley interrupts her manic musings to rant against the middle class, the stupid fucking workers who vote Republican, and all those feminists who identify her solely with her late husband. In poem after poemand they all read like one congealed massNotley claims to disdain the opinions of others, yet she continually worries about social graces, the social ego, socialization, and the hustle for status(to which she does not seem immune). Perhaps living is a poem, as Notley confidently avers, but her life on the page isnt necessarily poetry youd care to read.
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