The Dream of a Common Language
Adrienne Rich
When Adrienne Rich died earlier this year, I felt compelled to pick up something of hers, since I couldn't recall reading much of her work before, though I felt familiar with her in principle. It took me a while to actually get to reading this since I haven't been reading much poetry lately and it often feels like a bear switching of gears when you are out of practice.
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As Ever
Joanne Kyger
This collection has been hanging out on my bedside table for months, read in little pieces until finally this week I decided it would not be renewed again. I picked it up in the midst of the Desecheo Notebook (circa 1971), a semi-diary. In some ways her poetry can at times chronicle specific time periods and feel very similar to her published journals, Strange Big Moon, which I failed to get through earlier this year. But this collection spans so many decades that it doesn't get so bogged down in the every day.
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Plainwater
Anne Carson
After Anne Carson won me over at her Nox reading, I finally put this collection of poetry and essays on hold. It seems like several people have noted it as their favorite volume of hers. Right now I was drawn more to her essays than the various sections of verse, especially the two pilgrammages within "The Anthropology of Water." But there was also this afterword to "Canicula di Anna":
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Nox
Anne Carson
—Read more…I wanted to fill my elegy with light of all kinds. But death makes us stingy.
The Best 10 Minutes of Your Life
Zoe Whittall
—Read more…Thanksgiving in Dundas
Hitching the Hamilton highway
styrofoam hot chocolate
Sad Little Breathing Machine
Matthea Harvey
For whatever reason, this collection didn't strike me as much as Modern Life did. But there were poems I liked.
—Read more…The Crowds Cheered as Gloom Galloped Away
Averno
Louise Glück
I remembered reading Louise Glück before but I didn't go back and refresh my memory on what I said about The Seven Ages until after I read this book. I think I have to deduce that I'm not that into her poetry as I could almost say the exact thing this time around.
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Modern Life
Matthea Harvey
There are many interesting takes on "modern" life in this collection of poems. From the kind of anachronistically futurist Robo-Boy placed in a banal contemporary setting to the militarily apocalyptic series that maps words found between future and terror in the dictionary. The two semi-abecedarian series ascend the alphabet in one and descend in the other but maintain the same sense of desolation.
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Collected Poems
Paul Auster
Reading this book on the subway was probably not the best approach, but I managed to struggle through it. Auster's earlier poems have some overwrought tendencies, but in a way all of his poems fit together as a larger work, making this collected volume very useful. He's attached to images of stones and whiteness and snow among other things, and many common images are threaded across his work. He has a tendency towards oxymoronic lines and a knack for good poetic punchlines, endings that could almost sit on their own:
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Sixty Odd
Ursula K. Le Guin
I took out a bunch of poetry books and maybe I just wasn't in the mood for this one, or maybe I'm not into Le Guin's poetic "wryness." I suppose she is better known for her fantasy and sci-fi fiction.
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