Review by New York Times Review
"PLEASE TAKE A piece of me back home," Bernadette Mayer requests; "give everybody/everything." Mayer's poetic career embodies that generous impulse: Most of her 20-odd books and collaborations show by effusive, charming, sometimes hyperbolic example how to reject any model of poetry that requires perfection and uptight isolation. Instead, her unrhymed sonnets, her seemingly slapdash odes, her versified diary entries let her, and her readers, live in the moment, opening us up to other people's cares and joys and wishes and words, in the New York City art scene where she began and in the greener parts of New York State - "Albany and Rensselaer counties" - that provide her territory now. "Works and Days" intersperses verse with prose from a daybook, notes on the seasons and musings on Mayer's five-decade career: "Today the sun's always setting/Isn't every day weird?" "When Steven Jay Gould was growing up/The other kids called him Fossil Face. I have worked/Hard all my life & I still have no house, no wife." Time itself - the millenniums addressed by paleontology, the daily track of sun from dawn to dusk, the course from childhood to wage-earning adulthood - gets contested and confounded in Mayer's poems, replaced with disarmingly intimate, conjured-up space. Mayer's goals are radically democratic, opposed to hierarchies of all sorts, and they generate a radical (some might say unworkable) politics: For her, "rich people/Duped everyone into thinking everything isn't free"; "Like Bernadette Mayer, she was an anarchist but not the bomb-throwing sort." Mayer is the writing sort of anarchist - the effusive sort, the kind who hopes, with William Blake, that poems can free us from our mind-forged manacles: "I still think angles and angels are the same/And no backyard is ever over-rated/Superb without beginnings, middles/Or ends." Named for a long ancient Greek poem that explains both agriculture and mythology, Mayer's "Works and Days" is a version of pastoral, using its rural vistas to criticize the built-up society she views at one remove. Sometimes her verse (like Frank O'Hara's) invites us into a perpetual party, though elsewhere her whimsy becomes almost bleak. Finches, thanks to climate change, "stay here for winter now," so "when/They all fly away at once, it's spring/Or something, a new season called WHOOSH." Mayer's poems, too, go "Whoosh." They have the playfulness of a wise child, even when they reflect on our endangered planet, or on her advancing age. The past year has seen a Mayer renaissance. The avant-garde press Station Hill brought out "Eating the Colors of a Line-up of Words," which collects hard-to-find or out-of-print books from the 1970s; New York City's Tender Buttons Press, whose first publication was Mayer's much imitated "Sonnets," has folded it into the recent "Tender Omnibus." Readers who find Mayer through this late-life pastoral can move on to those more challenging volumes, or to her book-length poem on motherhood, "Midwinter Day." Mayer is no Pollyanna: One poem here ends "Oh Rosa Parks I thought things'd/Be better than this." Another concedes, "As far/As I can figure humans get stuck with mishegoss" - Yiddish for "craziness" - "No matter how, when, where or why." She is, however, an optimist; her language - sometimes childlike, but with a learned vocabulary - models a freedom that many poets have sought but few have made so smart or so odd, festooned with children's games and singsong rhymes: "Oily oily income free/Ghost duck not space duck.... Will you marry me? You'll get a huge diamond/And a peony dress sewn with vines." Such loose-woven verse is not for everyone. Yeats said that a finished poem should click shut like a box. Mayer's poems never do; instead, they stay open - to her, to her populous, flowering world and to the readers who might complete, or imitate, or simply live with them, taking their rough patches and digressions as part of her inviting whole. STEPHEN BURT'S new book, "The Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them," will be published this month.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 18, 2016]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The prolific Mayer (Eating the Colors of a Lineup of Words) gives a nod to Hesiod as she meticulously and humanistically deliberates on the ways that various environments-including the natural, political, and economic-influence the personal. The collection is constructed around a series of first-person meditations, reminiscent of diary entries, that document the indecisiveness of modern weather patterns ("Winter forgot its car keys") and the waking of the natural world as summer reluctantly arrives ("The peonies start, the fig tree made it. I think it's raining now, it's like a misting tent"). Mixed in with the book's measured documentation of several months are personal lists, bits about tenant protests against landlords from New York state history, jumble puzzles from the daily paper, notes on climate change, and more. In this way the history and present moment of a place gain equal importance. As time passes, Mayer, with characteristic humor, inventive language, and straightforwardness, creates a work that is at once hopeful, anticapitalist, and deeply invested in the personal. Mayer's poems often juxtapose the concepts of nature and ownership, but nature always wins out: "property is robbery, give everybody/ everything, other birds walk this way too." (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
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