jasonvpurcell's review
3.0
Having read and loved her novel THE LIZARD CAGE, I expected a lot from this collection of poetry. I expected the same political engagement, the same interest in the ethics of citizenship, refuge, and violence. Instead, I found this collection to be less focussed. I liked the collection, but it was unbalanced, with a much stronger second half. Connelly quotes Camus in her epigraph, "the artist is ... dreaming of justice, yet being himself a source of injustice," but I didn't find Connelly to be as aware of herself as a poet in this collection. The ethics of watching and of writing, the violence of representation, only emerged briefly—"I presume nothing, having / no rights among your dreams,"—and I had hoped for more of this awareness.
She is a very good writer, and there were plenty of lines that I got excited over. When she wrote about classification and categorization of refugees—"He asks, / Do you have the documents / to prove you are human?"—I felt threads of what she explored in THE LIZARD CAGE, and also felt rumblings of Michael Helm's CITIES OF REFUGE. This is what I'm interested in, and would have preferred more engagement with these ideas.
In all, though, a good collection of poetry, and I look forward to reading more of her work.
She is a very good writer, and there were plenty of lines that I got excited over. When she wrote about classification and categorization of refugees—"He asks, / Do you have the documents / to prove you are human?"—I felt threads of what she explored in THE LIZARD CAGE, and also felt rumblings of Michael Helm's CITIES OF REFUGE. This is what I'm interested in, and would have preferred more engagement with these ideas.
In all, though, a good collection of poetry, and I look forward to reading more of her work.
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