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Our Lady Of The Ruins (2012)

by Traci Brimhall(Favorite Author)

4.25 of 5 Votes: 1

languge

English

genre

Poetry

publisher

W.W. Norton and Company, Inc.

review 1: So hard to read on the heels of Li-Young Lee. Where he says so much with so little, I found that this collection said so little with so much--but that is too harsh. There are some INCREDIBLE images and ideas here and an authority in tone and execution that I greatly admire. Loved the opening line that many have pointed to: "Imagine half the world ends and half the world continues." Love the poem title: "A Year Between Wars." Love the threatening, apocalyptic atmosphere and the speaker's knowledge of troubled knowledge, as well as the creation of strange, half-understood symbols and images. Love and understand why for different reasons the amazing poets Carolyn Forche, Saskia Hamilton, Gregory Orr, and Tracy K. Smith all endorse this book. So much to love here. Really. But ... moreI also found many throwaway lines that were perhaps more powerful to others. For example, I found too many lines like this: "Love is the baker selling bread to the hangman." I don't find this image very exciting: yes, life and death are juxtaposed, this is a world where people are professions are in the midst of a fallen hierarchy (apocalypse, ahem), ok, ok, I get it. Perhaps, it was a problem for me of quantity. Style-wise, I grew tired of the stacking of the above, shall we say, social images, as well as the stacking of brutal images and imperatives. I grew tired of the gaudiness of many of the images, like this overwrought one (which others are sure to love): "deer licking salt from a lynched man's palm." At a different stage in my life, I would have eaten these poems up with a pitchfork. Makes me want to reread other works that recall this one--Matthea Harvey's "Modern Life" and Djuna Barnes' "Nightwood" come straight to mind--and see if I would have a similar reaction to them or still find them brilliant and their gaudiness of interest. Last word: Brimhall is definitely a very talented poet, one to keep track of.
review 2: "Imagine half the world ends and the other half continues" is the opening line of the opening poem called Music from a Burning Piano. That line sets the ground for all of the rest of the poems in this collection. The language has an elegaic beauty and a core of darkness--remembering loss. This is not a simple book. There is no clear recovery or resolution. Even in the last poem called The New World, we find a sense in which the newness is the tissue grown over the wound--"We heal whether we want to or not"--implying not freedom, but a fatalism to living through destruction. less

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