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| AUTHOR: | Elizabeth Spires |
| CATEGORY: | Book |
| MANUFACTURER: | Carnegie-Mellon University Press |
| ISBN: | 088748249X |
| TYPE: | American - General, Music, Poetry |
| MEDIA: | Paperback |
| # OF MEDIA: | 1 |
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Customer Reviews of Swan's Island
A book worthwhile, read it... "Letter from Swan's Island" stands out as the brilliant poem of this collection. It has audacity-- that is, the narrator seems confident in an idiosyncratic presentation of life. The grand poem behind this poem is Marianne Moore's "The Steeple Jack."
Consider:
"It could not be dangerous to be living /
in a town like this, of simple people,/
who have a steeple-jack placing danger-signs by the church /
while he is gilding the solid- /
pointed star, which on a steeple /
stands for hope." (Moore "The Steeple Jack).
then:
"... Is evil possible here /where everyone lives so individually / and nature appears to be neutral / toward everything but itself?" (Spires "Letter...").
You see how these narrators consider landscapes similarly-- thinking about the possibilities of life in relation to nature and the nature of people living in the area. "[danger]" and "evil" are responded to similarly.
The language of Elizabeth Spires' collection maintains a laconic quality that gives it an air of elegance. A lot of times, this allows reading to move on smoothly-- like you were reading a Frost poem. But this collection's sensibility is different from Frost's. "Crazy Quilt" is a strong poem. It is a remembrance of childhood where "mother" and "father" are like (presumably)"sun" and "moon" ("at odds with one another," or like "dog" and "calico cat"). The narrator finds "unreasoning," remembering childhood; it is like the title "Crazy Quilt"-- that is the conceit here. To find the mother, particularly, in the quilt is the quest of this questing poet. In this sense, it becomes a sort of ars poetika about mother poets in relation to the successors.
Overall, the collection becomes worthy if you do some close readings. Nonetheless, the read is enjoyable, the voice original. It is not a pretentious poet here. This makes me want to get her new book when it comes out in September 2002.