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treycooper's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? N/A
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A
4.25
rustbeltjessie's review against another edition
4.0
I’ve only read Frank Stanford in bits and pieces before; mostly quotations + a few complete poems, but never this much at once. This book completely broke my brain, in the best possible way. I feel my own poems bursting forth from me, the sort of poems I didn't even know I was capable of.
heypretty52's review
Read the first quarter of this collection. Putting on the shelf as a possible later read. Interesting to revisit Stanford after 20 years through a different lens.
expendablemudge's review
5.0
Happy Hump Day, everyone! I'm reading poetry books, plural (hence the double review, this book's is the second of the two below so keep scrolling), on this positively sun-struck breezy day.
Pick y'all's selves up off the floor at your leisure. Meanwhile let me explain.
[b:The Art of Dying|36627632|The Art of Dying|Sarah Tolmie|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1529064415s/36627632.jpg|58390883] was one helluva wallop. Y'all might remember that I fell in love with its cover, enough that I used A Canadian Friend's gift to me to procure a copy after the AUP awards showed it to me:
So I was reading the short, super-concentrated poems. "Self," I said to myself, "this is the Sh...tuff. This is why all those pretentious pit-sniffers whose only love is self-love (in all its meanings) write their vapid maunderings with silly line breaks."
I know, right?!
Memento mori...and does Sarah Tolmie ever put memory through its paces. I was, and am, compelled to think deeply about ten-line word paintings. That's not the commonest feeling for me. "You too will die" is my preferred translation from the Latin (pace Latinists with exact translations) of the phrase and that thought is ever with me. I think a lot of people shy away from the idea of Death when what they actually fear is the process of dying. We're divorced from its realities by the medicalization of illness. The process is part of Life, not of Death...and that's a Tolmie thought that I think makes the whole fear industry tremble.
It's the very first poem, in its entirety; it sets a tone for this collection that the remaining artistry very much delivers on.
You're not afraid of Death. I can almost promise you that you haven't thought about Death much at all. The pain and enfeeblement of illness are the things that inspire most people to flee screaming from the mere mention of Death. Its reality is possibly more terrifying: The Great Unknown, the place we're all going but no one has ever come back from to tell us about. (I am not religious and I don't believe y'all's bedtime story is in any way factual.)
A Facebook chat with an author of horror novels that I had very recently made me think again about why horror has no fear for me. The silliness of the rituals surrounding Death has always struck my funny bone. I save my sadness and longing for the living. They can make use of it, they can feel my empathy and my lovingkindness and my appreciation. The dead? I suspect they survive in some form. I doubt very much its a form we'd recognize. But the body horror and supernatural horror of the storytelling world, the world that this author and many like her inhabit, have little actual potency and their imaginative powers exert force on our imaginations in proportion to our fear of Death (which, I said above, I believe to be a fear of the process of dying).
The attentive will note my approbation of a rhyming-couplets poem.
Pick y'all's selves up off the floor at your leisure.
The New York Times photo
Then, after that delight to my literary sensibilities arose from the quantum foam, I read this article from The Millions and was reminded of Frank Stanford, whose 1978 collection [b:Crib Death|91004|Crib Death|Frank Stanford|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1355566253s/91004.jpg|87812] I found on my then-boyfriend the much older alcoholic abuser's shelf.
I read that as a teen and was shocked to my still-forming core that someone out there Got Me. The obsessive need for someone's presence. The intense internal fire that only comes to the surface when mundane reality offers a single, fleeting, unremarkable image of one's inner state and thus crystallizes reality in the same stunning, unexpected way that a chemistry demonstration creates shocking clouds of sharpness from water.
I don't mean to give y'all the impression that I can just *poof* summon up a poem from 40-year-old memories. I got the text from my memory of the book's and the poem's title and then checked out of the library [b:What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford|23129928|What About This Collected Poems of Frank Stanford|Frank Stanford|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1421890213s/23129928.jpg|42677745]. This kitten-squisher of a volume...750 pages!...collects a thorough and informed sampling of his magic mountain of work both published and unpublished. I got re-interested in Stanford after reading in the above-referenced article that Stanford had committed suicide at 29.
Twenty-nine.
Imagine the life unlived, the art unmade; the world's loss is incalculable when Death takes some unhappy or unwilling soul away from whatever Reality finally turns out to be. Assuming we ever find out, that is.
So the book...elephantine tome!...slogged home in my shoulder tote on a cold and rainy day. I sat right down to look for this deeply meaningful memory, but being a bookish sort, was unable not to read both the Introduction (by one Dean Young, previously unknown to me) and the Editor's Note by Copper Canyon Press publisher Michael Wiegers. I discovered this unlikely-to-be-memed aperçu in Young's Introduction:
What is more irrational than Death? Dying is rational, can be subjected to analysis and quantification, is possible to construct a schema to slot into one's syllogistic understanding of Life.
Death is the Great Unknown. Frank Stanford got that, and wrote with its reality up front and up close and personal:
An unpolished scream of a betrayed husband, a howl of the pain of being unwanted and still alive, a rage-filled hate-fuelled moment in time that Stanford lived and left uncollected in his paper alp. He's dead, he's dying in front of our horrified eyes always and forever.
Or is he the moon.
Or the chigger.
The reddener of millions of feet, ankles bending to bring them within frantic scratching distance of fingers long ago rotted away. The annoying, irritating, sometimes sickening (in all its senses) reminder that we're alive and Life is a Death sentence. Irrationally clawing at the reddened surface of our living corpses, we read poems by artists like Frank Stanford who just couldn't endure the long way home.
Pick y'all's selves up off the floor at your leisure. Meanwhile let me explain.
[b:The Art of Dying|36627632|The Art of Dying|Sarah Tolmie|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1529064415s/36627632.jpg|58390883] was one helluva wallop. Y'all might remember that I fell in love with its cover, enough that I used A Canadian Friend's gift to me to procure a copy after the AUP awards showed it to me:
So I was reading the short, super-concentrated poems. "Self," I said to myself, "this is the Sh...tuff. This is why all those pretentious pit-sniffers whose only love is self-love (in all its meanings) write their vapid maunderings with silly line breaks."
Most books of poems are far too short.first two stanzas of poem 22
It's hard to get your money's worth.
How does it make sense in the marketplace
To pay twelve quid for sixty pages?
Or fifteen euros, or twenty bucks?
So poets are shit out of luck.
I know, right?!
Memento mori...and does Sarah Tolmie ever put memory through its paces. I was, and am, compelled to think deeply about ten-line word paintings. That's not the commonest feeling for me. "You too will die" is my preferred translation from the Latin (pace Latinists with exact translations) of the phrase and that thought is ever with me. I think a lot of people shy away from the idea of Death when what they actually fear is the process of dying. We're divorced from its realities by the medicalization of illness. The process is part of Life, not of Death...and that's a Tolmie thought that I think makes the whole fear industry tremble.
Hate to tell you, but you're going to die.
Quite soon. Me, too.
Shuck off the wisdom while it's warm.
Death does no harm
To wisdom.
It's the very first poem, in its entirety; it sets a tone for this collection that the remaining artistry very much delivers on.
You're not afraid of Death. I can almost promise you that you haven't thought about Death much at all. The pain and enfeeblement of illness are the things that inspire most people to flee screaming from the mere mention of Death. Its reality is possibly more terrifying: The Great Unknown, the place we're all going but no one has ever come back from to tell us about. (I am not religious and I don't believe y'all's bedtime story is in any way factual.)
It continues to be fashionable to mourn the death of ritual.first stanza of poem 10
We miss the Neolithic ochre, smoking censers, silly hats
Cthulhu and Harryhausen prayers, all the mystic flap.
A Facebook chat with an author of horror novels that I had very recently made me think again about why horror has no fear for me. The silliness of the rituals surrounding Death has always struck my funny bone. I save my sadness and longing for the living. They can make use of it, they can feel my empathy and my lovingkindness and my appreciation. The dead? I suspect they survive in some form. I doubt very much its a form we'd recognize. But the body horror and supernatural horror of the storytelling world, the world that this author and many like her inhabit, have little actual potency and their imaginative powers exert force on our imaginations in proportion to our fear of Death (which, I said above, I believe to be a fear of the process of dying).
Death looks a lot like success.Poem 42 in its entirety
As in, "I killed that test"
"She slays me" and the rest—
Though it's the act and not the state
Whose power we appropriate,
All us murderous wannabes
In our casual hyperboles.
The attentive will note my approbation of a rhyming-couplets poem.
Pick y'all's selves up off the floor at your leisure.
The New York Times photo
Then, after that delight to my literary sensibilities arose from the quantum foam, I read this article from The Millions and was reminded of Frank Stanford, whose 1978 collection [b:Crib Death|91004|Crib Death|Frank Stanford|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1355566253s/91004.jpg|87812] I found on my then-boyfriend the much older alcoholic abuser's shelf.
The Neighbor's Wife
Four a.m. and she's still gone
But I'm not going to call.
It's not so bad, until just before morning,
When I see a truck driver
Take a smoke out of his lips
And throw it out the window
And I watch it go to pieces
All over the road.
I read that as a teen and was shocked to my still-forming core that someone out there Got Me. The obsessive need for someone's presence. The intense internal fire that only comes to the surface when mundane reality offers a single, fleeting, unremarkable image of one's inner state and thus crystallizes reality in the same stunning, unexpected way that a chemistry demonstration creates shocking clouds of sharpness from water.
I don't mean to give y'all the impression that I can just *poof* summon up a poem from 40-year-old memories. I got the text from my memory of the book's and the poem's title and then checked out of the library [b:What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford|23129928|What About This Collected Poems of Frank Stanford|Frank Stanford|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1421890213s/23129928.jpg|42677745]. This kitten-squisher of a volume...750 pages!...collects a thorough and informed sampling of his magic mountain of work both published and unpublished. I got re-interested in Stanford after reading in the above-referenced article that Stanford had committed suicide at 29.
Twenty-nine.
Imagine the life unlived, the art unmade; the world's loss is incalculable when Death takes some unhappy or unwilling soul away from whatever Reality finally turns out to be. Assuming we ever find out, that is.
So the book...elephantine tome!...slogged home in my shoulder tote on a cold and rainy day. I sat right down to look for this deeply meaningful memory, but being a bookish sort, was unable not to read both the Introduction (by one Dean Young, previously unknown to me) and the Editor's Note by Copper Canyon Press publisher Michael Wiegers. I discovered this unlikely-to-be-memed aperçu in Young's Introduction:
Many of these poems seem as if they were written with a burnt stick. With blood, in river mud. There is something thankfully unexamined in their execution. I say "thankfully" because we have been through a long century of self-consciousness and irony, and while their brand of rigor and suspicion have brought intelligence to American poetry they have also brought rigor mortis, they have deadened the nerves and made poets fear the irrational.
What is more irrational than Death? Dying is rational, can be subjected to analysis and quantification, is possible to construct a schema to slot into one's syllogistic understanding of Life.
Death is the Great Unknown. Frank Stanford got that, and wrote with its reality up front and up close and personal:
Putting Up Fence
I believe the moon wades a creek
Like an albino with a blade
Fixed to a stick.
It rises, red as a place
Where a chigger's been.
Voyeur in the loft, leaving your gum
Stuck to a fork in the barn,
Like a porter paid to listen
With his head in a portal
Of a ship returning before it's due.
Then I come down the road with ice.
An unpolished scream of a betrayed husband, a howl of the pain of being unwanted and still alive, a rage-filled hate-fuelled moment in time that Stanford lived and left uncollected in his paper alp. He's dead, he's dying in front of our horrified eyes always and forever.
Or is he the moon.
Or the chigger.
The reddener of millions of feet, ankles bending to bring them within frantic scratching distance of fingers long ago rotted away. The annoying, irritating, sometimes sickening (in all its senses) reminder that we're alive and Life is a Death sentence. Irrationally clawing at the reddened surface of our living corpses, we read poems by artists like Frank Stanford who just couldn't endure the long way home.
malorie's review
5.0
It is very difficult for me to review poetry just because this book is made up of hundreds of individual little pieces and hundreds of individual little emotions. Frank Stanford, in my estimation, is brilliant in how raw he is, and how harrowing his poetry can be, but how also he can weave in almost a sweetness. There came a point where I almost felt that marking pages with tabs was a pointless endeavor & resign myself to the fact that pretty much the whole book spoke to me on one level or another. I appreciated how his this compilation was punctuated with photographs from Stanford's journals, and rough copies of his poetry--Copper Canyon Press did a beautiful job putting together this collection and it is probably one of the most well crafted collections of poetry that I own.
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