Review by New York Times Review
IF YOU WERE LIVING in England a little over a thousand years ago, you might have listened with great satisfaction as a poet recited lines like these: We the West-Saxons, Long as the daylight Lasted, in companies Troubled the track of the host that we hated, Grimly with swords that were sharp from the grindstone, Fiercely we hack'd at the flyers before us. This cheerily savage testimony comes from the ancient Anglo-Saxon poem "The Battle of Brunanburh," and it offers a vision of warfare that has nearly vanished from English-language poetry. As Jon Stallworthy observes in his introduction to "The New Oxford Book of War Poetry," despite poetry's martial heritage, "much - and most recent - war poetry has been implicitly, if not explicitly, antiwar." This is to be expected. The nature and scale of human conflict has changed, Stallworthy notes, making poets vastly more likely to be appalled by war's consequences than inspired by acts of individual bravery. It's one thing, after all, to celebrate the courage of 50 men protecting your village from Viking invaders; quite another to be confronted with the smoldering trenches of World War I. But if war poetry has largely resolved into opposition, this doesn't simplify it as an undertaking. War poems have a reportorial function: They give us the news about something that has happened. And despite recent suggestions to the contrary, readers generally don't like their news to be fake; they want it to be (or at least to seem) authentic. Here is where the trouble begins. Because the sense of authenticity - a fragile, volatile creation in even the simplest lyric about birch trees - is pressured from multiple angles in the contemporary war poem. Such a poem must feel authentic to an audience that in general has no personal experience with the direct effects of combat, and that struggles to evaluate the very authenticity it desires. Yet the poem must also seem to come from an authentic perspective - that is, readers may be dismayed to discover that the poet who wrote so movingly about Qusayr has himself never left the battle-scarred streets of Iowa City. American poets (with rare exceptions like Brian Türner and Kevin Powers) have little involvement with the American military. This is by no means to imply that poets can write effectively about wars only if they've worked as soldiers, medics or war correspondents. But it does mean that when writing a war poem, they have to worry about genuineness in a way that they may not when writing about, for instance, sex. No one is concerned if a poet's own erotic résumé doesn't include the mild bondage that spices up his 20 lines in Tin House. But a poet who has never been to Syria invokes the shelling of a Syrian village at the risk of losing, if not angering, the reader. As a genre, war poetry is built in the shadow of that ancient workshop bulwark "Write what you know" and its postmodern addition, "or at least can convincingly appear to know." So what do contemporary poets know, or seem to know, about war? One of the best answers is: Not much. But knowing what you don't know can turn out to be more than enough. Jill McDonough's new book, REAPER (Alice James Books, paper, $15.95), broods over the technology of war - in particular the development of robots, drones and other methods of outsourcing human intelligence and morality to code and circuits. (The first line in her first poem is "I go to the park to see the robots rise," which is both potentially true - she's talking about watching the engineers from a nearby robotics company test their inventions - and a clever upending of the pastoral tradition.) McDonough is no expert, and much of the force of her writing comes from its very secondhandedness. As her chatty lines ("We go see the Rockettes... ") move through the gestures of the modern lyric - only one poem goes over a page, and most use a staccato, colloquial free verse - we get the sense of a writer trying to come to terms with something that is part of her country's reality but not part of her own. She's open about this: Multiple poems credit sources like Matt J. Martin's "Predator: The Remote-Control Air War Over Iraq and Afghanistan: A Pilot's Story" and John Sifton's essay "A Brief History of Drones." Sometimes this can make poems seem like book reports: Surveillance balloons over Afghanistan, even cheaper than drones. Chubby, white, fishy with fins. In Helmand they call them milk fish. In Kandahar they're frogs because big eyes. You may as well just read the New York Times article from which this poem was most likely derived. But when McDonough turns to her own consciousness as it is informed by her research, the results are much more arresting. She visits the Imperial War Museum in Duxford, England, and asks to see the old-fashioned drones: The wooden-propellered Falconer is sleek as canoe, red as a wagon. The kind Marilyn Monroe built: it's in the pictures of her as a child bride, a Rosie-the-Riveter type. A baby is crying, a boy with Tourette's swears. All through the museum you see names, see what names can do. Strikemaster, Liberator, Vampire. Hellcat, Avenger. Victor, Hind. Calling All Everyone! Calling All Everyone! shouts the boy through the playground's megaphone. Calling All Everyone! he's shouting again, from the top of the fake control tower. What does this poem know about Kandahar? Not much, perhaps. But it knows more than enough about violence, which is the ultimate duty of the war lyric. That said, the war lyric is not the only sort of war poetry, as the Welsh poet Owen Sheers's verse play pink mist (Nan a. Taiese/Doubieday, $26.95) capably demonstrates. "Pink Mist" tells the story of three fictional men from Bristol - Arthur, Hads and Taff - who join the British forces in Afghanistan, and it's based on interviews the author conducted with 30 veterans. Because this poem is also a play, the question of authenticity is slightly altered: We're concerned less with the author's experience than his characters' believability. Fortunately those characters can withstand the scrutiny. They argue, grieve, apologize and alternately console and reproach each other, as the lines flicker from the flattest vernacular ("Just got to griz it out," "In the past innit?") to unobtrusive, sometimes elegant rhyme and slant rhyme ("Don't say it, Arthur. Don't. / Cos it ain't right. They made us fit. / That's what they did. / Fit in, and fit for fighting. / Fighting fit."). Poetic grandstanding is almost ostentatiously avoided. Sheers wants to wound your heart with plainness. This can be a problem. At its worst the poem gives in to a sentimentality that is even more annoyingly literary for pretending otherwise. Arthur collects interesting bird eggs one spring before he departs (of course he does), and when he returns home, a flashback to an I.E.D. explosion causes him to flinch, breaking one of them ("The pale blue shards of the heron's egg / scattered inside the drawer, / like a broken promise"), and this in turn leads to his girlfriend, Gwen, announcing, "That night, when you finally came home, / I felt like that egg in your palm, / crushed to the bone." How helpfully symbolic this hobby has turned out to be. Good thing he didn't collect spoons. But in its more frequent affecting moments, the poem gives us a portrait of men and women in a state of bewildered ruin. Just a few stanzas after the lines above, Gwen reflects on the aftermath of her first sexual encounter with the damaged Arthur upon his return: "We going out?" That's all you said. Like nothing had happened. "Yeah," I replied. Trying to understand what it was that had died. Looking back though, perhaps you were right. Cos nothing is what it was. Nothing - that's what you filled me with that night. There is a kind of nothingness that haunts war poetry, even the exhortations of the old Anglo-Saxon bards. Not the quiet nothingness of death, though this is a part of it, but the burning, contagious nothingness that we call destruction. Which at times has filled, or emptied, all of us. DAVID ORR has been writing the On Poetry column for the Book Review since 2005. His new book, "You, Too, Could Write a Poem," was published in February.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 27, 2017]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Orr (The Road Not Taken) collects entries from his New York Times poetry column from the past 15 years, analyzing the works of individual poets and the state of the form itself. He provides equal parts illuminating commentary and hilarious jabs at the poetry world's insularity and pretensions. He playfully skewers Billy Collins in a verse that perfectly mimics Collins's signature style and disparages poets who are "small-scale epiphany manufacturers." Among his many skills, Orr displays a singular ability to capture a poet's sensibility, comparing Stevie Smith to a figure skater whose "seemingly purposeless meanderings" somehow "cut into the ice the figure of a hanged man." A very clever piece examining clichés of poetic "greatness" argues for Elizabeth Bishop's more subtle powers over "thunderbolt-chucking wild man" Robert Lowell. More user-friendly pieces look at the tradition of wedding poetry, poke fun at an O Magazine feature titled "Spring Fashion Modeled by Rising Young Poets," and summarily appraise James Franco's poetic output: "Is it, you may be wondering, good? No." Orr is an exceptional wit and critical talent, with perhaps his most brilliant feat here being how he dissolves some of poetry's opacity and makes it more accessible (and interesting) to a wider audience. Agent: Betsy Lerner, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
This inspiring collection of reviews and essays on the pleasures of poetry by New York Times poetry columnist Orr is a powerful example of why he is one of our sanest (and therefore most important) voices on this too-often-neglected art. The great gift that Orr brings to the discussion is his openness and willingness to grapple with the "actual experience of reading a poem." Perhaps Orr's background in law gives him this eye for the particularities of a poem and the need to build a case (for or against) not through agendas and theories but through evidence and facts. That attention is definitely his greatest strength, but it is delightfully paired with a delicious wit. Whether he is writing about "Oprah's Adventures in Poetry Land" or making a reference to TV's crime-solving attorney Matlock, Orr is always a fascinating, clever, and inspiring guide (perhaps most especially when it comes to the wonders of Elizabeth Bishop and Philip Larkin). Readers curious about the state of contemporary poetry and the value of reading a poem will love this book (even when they don't agree with it). -VERDICT All poetry collections should have a copy, and every librarian should be ready to put this charming volume in the hands of readers.-Herman Sutter, St. Agnes Acad., Houston © Copyright 2017. 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.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Fresh, vigorous, spirited views on poets and their work.Award-winning New York Times poetry columnist Orr (The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong, 2016, etc.) gathers 45 essays and reviews that amply demonstrate his irreverent wit and shrewd insights about poets, poems, and poetry readers, "all five of them." "I don't like poetry," he announces at the start, nor does he like poetry criticism, "unless it's written by someone who cares about criticism almost as much as he cares about poetry." Certainly, Orr cares about conveying his views in pithy, often elegant prose andperhaps bringing to bear his training as a lawyerdefending those views with exacting analyses. Despite his obvious erudition, the author is never a snob. Reflecting on the Best American Poetry series, he concedes that the series promotes the "appealingly democratic" idea of poetry "as a community activity. People are writing poems!' each volume cries. You, too, could write a poem!' " But Orr, who celebrates the "virtuosity" of technique in poets such as James Merrill, distinguishes between what the series deems "best" and what is truly great. In "Oprah's Adventures in Poetryland," Orr considers a special issue of O, The Oprah Magazine that featured fashions modeled by young women poets. "Only a snob or an idiot," he admits, "complains when the magic wand of Oprah is flourished in his direction." Although he applauds her for popularizing poetry, he regrets that nowhere in the issue does anyone consider "the actual experience of reading a poem." That experience is central to all of his essays: about Elizabeth Bishop, for example, whose work he finds characterized by "curious restraint"; poems by actor James Franco; and Louis MacNeice, whose reputation, Orr finds, is justifiably ascending. Orr says the greatest compliment for any critic "is to say that you found yourself thinking of his writing the next time you encountered a good poem." He abundantly deserves that same praise. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
