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A review by harryr
Balloon Pop Outlaw Black by Patricia Lockwood
4.0
The blurb says
which, you know, seems pretty fair… but if, like me, you're a bit ambivalent about whether 'surreal' and 'enigmatic' are necessarily positive qualities in poetry, I think it's worth adding that the language has a clarity, simplicity and sharpness to it which means that, whatever unexpected and inventive turns the poems take, they read beautifully.
I suppose the worry if I see something described as 'surreal' is that the writer has just chucked everything at the page to see what sticks; but that is not the case here. The poems are constantly moving in odd directions, but there is always a strong connecting thread; ideas are stretched and teased and inverted, and over and over again, the result is a clever, surprising image, a shift in tone, a new perspective.
Inevitably I clicked with some poems more than others, but the best of them, like 'The Quickening', about a whale and a boy, are magnificent.
‘Even all by themselves, the titles of Patricia Lockwood's poems reveal the sort of surreal, enigmatic, rhetorically-elongated world her sensibility inhabits effortlessly’
which, you know, seems pretty fair… but if, like me, you're a bit ambivalent about whether 'surreal' and 'enigmatic' are necessarily positive qualities in poetry, I think it's worth adding that the language has a clarity, simplicity and sharpness to it which means that, whatever unexpected and inventive turns the poems take, they read beautifully.
I suppose the worry if I see something described as 'surreal' is that the writer has just chucked everything at the page to see what sticks; but that is not the case here. The poems are constantly moving in odd directions, but there is always a strong connecting thread; ideas are stretched and teased and inverted, and over and over again, the result is a clever, surprising image, a shift in tone, a new perspective.
Inevitably I clicked with some poems more than others, but the best of them, like 'The Quickening', about a whale and a boy, are magnificent.