xterminal's review
3.0
Jill Bialosky, The End of Desire (Knopf, 2001)
I've been waiting for this book for a while. You see, back in autumn or thereabouts, I was planning out a review for a book (Stephen Tapscott's Another Body) that I was going to use to delineate the difference between a good poet and a great one. It was going along swimmingly until Tapscott got great in one section of the book, so I shelved those ideas until I found a book that would fit them. The End of Desire, as it turns out, is that book.
Every once in a while, a poet just doesn't know when to stop a poem. A poem is not a research paper, intro-paragraph-paragraph-paragraph-summary. We're supposed to come up with the summary (and, in some extreme cases, the paragraphs) on our own. One of the things that separates poetry from prose is that poetry should make the reader work for it. That's why I'm invariably disappointed in poems that end with couplets like “That's how I learned I had no power/to stop her nature from murdering beauty.” (from “My Mother Was a Lover of Flowers”); is there anything being said there that we wouldn't be able to get from the poem, having read it? Would the cutting out of those two lines take anything away from the poem? You haven't read the whole thing-- I don't think so, anyway-- so I'll tell you the answer: no. That's what the poet has spent the last twenty-six lines showing us. There's a reason “show, don't tell” is such a chestnut in writing workshops. We writers are a lazy lot; why should we have to do the work when we can get the readers to do it for us?
I don't mean this to sound overly negative, though obviously I've just spent a paragraph harping on the book's biggest failing in a review that will be, at most, four paragraphs. The fact is that when Jill Bialosky isn't treating poems like term papers, she's quite good at this poetry business. The book opens with a ten-page piece called “Fathers in the Snow”, and the first section of that piece is just about everything a fantastic poem should be.
“The game is called father.
My sister lies in the grass.
I take handfuls of leaves
we raked from the lawn
spilling them over her body
until she's buried--
her red jacket lost, completely.
Then it's my turn.
Afterwards, we pick the brittle pieces
from each other's hair.”
There are a few minor nits to pick with it, I think, but they're more matters of opinion than anything else (though some writers, those who live by “the adverb is not your friend” as solidly as I used to, would beg to differ with me, I'm sure); the base of it is as solid as they come. Bialosky doesn't give too much away, but gives us enough to figure out what she's on about, even without reading the other nine sections of the poem.
It's a first book, and thus some of the stuff that drags it down is probably excusable through that old “lack of experience” gorilla that likes to wander around the room plucking the hats off the audience members. The good parts of this book, and there are many, make the bad parts worth bearing. ***
I've been waiting for this book for a while. You see, back in autumn or thereabouts, I was planning out a review for a book (Stephen Tapscott's Another Body) that I was going to use to delineate the difference between a good poet and a great one. It was going along swimmingly until Tapscott got great in one section of the book, so I shelved those ideas until I found a book that would fit them. The End of Desire, as it turns out, is that book.
Every once in a while, a poet just doesn't know when to stop a poem. A poem is not a research paper, intro-paragraph-paragraph-paragraph-summary. We're supposed to come up with the summary (and, in some extreme cases, the paragraphs) on our own. One of the things that separates poetry from prose is that poetry should make the reader work for it. That's why I'm invariably disappointed in poems that end with couplets like “That's how I learned I had no power/to stop her nature from murdering beauty.” (from “My Mother Was a Lover of Flowers”); is there anything being said there that we wouldn't be able to get from the poem, having read it? Would the cutting out of those two lines take anything away from the poem? You haven't read the whole thing-- I don't think so, anyway-- so I'll tell you the answer: no. That's what the poet has spent the last twenty-six lines showing us. There's a reason “show, don't tell” is such a chestnut in writing workshops. We writers are a lazy lot; why should we have to do the work when we can get the readers to do it for us?
I don't mean this to sound overly negative, though obviously I've just spent a paragraph harping on the book's biggest failing in a review that will be, at most, four paragraphs. The fact is that when Jill Bialosky isn't treating poems like term papers, she's quite good at this poetry business. The book opens with a ten-page piece called “Fathers in the Snow”, and the first section of that piece is just about everything a fantastic poem should be.
“The game is called father.
My sister lies in the grass.
I take handfuls of leaves
we raked from the lawn
spilling them over her body
until she's buried--
her red jacket lost, completely.
Then it's my turn.
Afterwards, we pick the brittle pieces
from each other's hair.”
There are a few minor nits to pick with it, I think, but they're more matters of opinion than anything else (though some writers, those who live by “the adverb is not your friend” as solidly as I used to, would beg to differ with me, I'm sure); the base of it is as solid as they come. Bialosky doesn't give too much away, but gives us enough to figure out what she's on about, even without reading the other nine sections of the poem.
It's a first book, and thus some of the stuff that drags it down is probably excusable through that old “lack of experience” gorilla that likes to wander around the room plucking the hats off the audience members. The good parts of this book, and there are many, make the bad parts worth bearing. ***
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