Stay, illusion

Review by Booklist Review

Brock-Broido (Trouble in Mind, 2004) fills the page with long, sweeping lines, taking all the space she needs for her motley cotillions of jostling and twirling ideas and images. Her counterintuitive word choices and usage, sneaky metaphors, and reeled-in-from-afar allusions all somersault through the mind, sparking, flashing, and snapping us awake to a fresh form of attention. In her fourth book, her hopscotch imagination induces us to contemplate what is seen and what is overlooked, what is felt and what is denied. With a fingertip, a raised eyebrow, the touch of a divining rod, a whirled cloak, Brock-Broido sets poems in motion about nature corralled, animals indentured and slaughtered, and melting arctic ice that strands polar bears. The poet sees the world whole and netted. In Heat, she links girls in Belarus to Oswald and the Kennedy assassination to the open-carry gun law in Oklahoma I just feel more safe, said Joe Wood, cocked / Among the waffles and the syrups and the diners. Like Jorie Graham and Laurie Sheck, Brock-Broido is brainy, alluring, inventive, witty, and tough.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Gorgeous and grim, elaborate yet forthright about the causes (and the effects) of its sadness, this fourth collection from Brock-Broido (Trouble in Mind) spins, drapes, and sculpts its virtuosic figures around the ideas and emotions of mourning. Often Brock-Broido commemorates her father, remembering him on his own, in her family, in conjunction with her own past selves: "If my own voice falters," one poem begins, "tell them hubris was my way of adoring you." (Her title quotes Hamlet, addressing his father's ghost.) Long lines deliquesce; long titles and longer sentences mix ceremonial beauty with self-reproach, not only in the many poems that touch on the poet's family but also in the standouts that remember other events, not least the executions of Tookie Williams and other victims of the American death penalty. Part tapestry, part astronomy, part dollhouse, the metaphorical verve that has made Brock-Broido influential-and sometimes controversial-remains abundant: Brock-Broido envisions herself once "In a poplin nightgown and my mallow-color shoes,// With all my lionlikes about me," and again with "my own ivory hillocks, my toy/ Pram filled with slippery mice, my own mares fetlock-deep in squalls/ Of snow." And yet-even more than in her previous book (which remembered her mother)-Brock-Broido can grow stark, unornamented, directly moving, too. A poem about a dying body asks, "Put your hands/ Into the sheets and tell me where the needles are," and a fine elegy for the poet Liam Rector concludes, simply, "Would that our Liam were living still." (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

The world created by Witter Bynner Prize winner Brock-Broido (Trouble in Mind) is elegant, self-contained, baroquely sensuous, and gaspingly, glazedly beautiful. It's also a tough world to enter, requiring fierce concentration as we step gingerly through seemingly disassociated lines: "If it is written down, you can't rescind it./ Spoon and potage bowl./ You are starving. Come closer." Once we arrive, we start seeing trouble, the gorgeousness edged by sadness, hunger, death: "The misfortunes of a saint condemned to turn great sorrows// into greater egrets, ice-bound and irrevocable." Even as Brock-Broido uses supreme magic to transform those sorrows, she reminds us of our physicality ("Your heart was a mess-// a mob of hoofprints"), our indifference ("How dare you come home from your factory/ .weathered/ and -incurious"), our neediness ("I miss your heart, my heart"), our dwelling in a world of "sooty basements of churches/ Full of persons wrapped in the coppery leather limbs of methadone" and "private gardens/.[where] the animals are harnessed in// Or bled out broad." VERDICT There's no easy escaping in these poems, and Brock-Broido makes us work for our pleasure, but many will start out doubters and end up converts. Grand for sophisticated readers.-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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You Have Harnessed Yourself Ridiculously To This World Tell the truth I told me When I couldn't speak. Sorrow's a barbaric art, crude as a Viking ship Or a child Who rode a spotted pony to the lake away from summer In the 1930s Toward the iron lung of polio. According to the census I am unmarried And unchurched. The woman in the field dressed only in the sun. Too far gone to halt the Arctic Cap's catastrophe, big beautiful Blubbery white bears each clinging to his one last hunk of ice. I am obliged, now, to refrain from dying, for as long as it is possible. For whom left am I first? We have come to terms with our Self Like a marmoset getting out of her Great Ape suit. Dove, Interrupted Don't do that when you're dead like this, I said, Arguably still squabbling about the word inarguably. I haunt Versailles, poring through the markets of the medieval. Mostly meat to be sold there. Mutton hangs Like laundry pinkened on its line. And gold! --a chalice with a cure for living in it. We step over the skirt of an Elizabeth. Red grapes, a delicacy, each peeled for us--each sheath The vestment of a miniature priest, disrobed. A sister is an Old World sparrow placed in a satin shoe. The weakling's saddle is worn down from just too much sad attitude. No one wants to face the "opaque reality" of herself. For the life of me. I was made American. You must consider this. Whatever suffering is insufferable is punishable by perishable. In Vienne, the rabbit Maurice is at home in the family cage. I ache for him, his boredom and his solitude. On suffering and animals, inarguably, they do. I miss your heart, my heart. For A Snow Leopard in October Stay, little ounce, here in Fleece and leaf with me, in the evermore Where swans trembled in the lake around our bed of hay and morning Came each morning like a felt cloak billowing Across the most pale day. It was the color of a steeple disappearing In an old Venetian sky. Or of a saint tamping the grenadine Of his heavy robes before the Blessing of the Animals. I've heard tell of men who brought Great Pyrenees, a borzoi, or Some pocket mice, baskets of mourning doves beneath their wicker lids, A chameleon on a leash from the Prussian circuses, And from the farthest Caucasus, some tundra wolves in pairs. In a meadow I had fallen As deep in sleep as a trilobite in the red clay of the centuries. Even now, just down our winding road, I can hear the children blanketing Themselves to sleep in leaves from maple trees. No bad dreams will come to them I know Because once, in the gone-ago, I was a lynx as well, safe as a tiger-iris In its silt on the banks of the Euphrates, as you were. Would they take You now from me, like Leonardo's sleeve disappearing in The air. And when I woke I could not wake You, little sphinx, I could not keep you here with me. Anywhere, I could not bear to let you go. Stay here In our clouded bed of wind and timothy with me. Lie here with me in snow. Excerpted from Stay, Illusion: Poems by Lucie Brock-Broido All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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