Many of the books on this list achieve their effects by indirection and reserve, veiled meanings and metaphors. Kim Addonizio’s
Tell Me (published in 2000, just under the wire for a “20th Century” list) is a good reminder that sometimes the best way to say something is to come right out and say it--especially if you can say it so well and with such burning immediacy.
Some of the most arresting poems in
Tell Me (“Glass,” “Collapsing Poem,” "The Revered Poet Instructs Her Students on the Importance of Revision”) derive their power from the voice of an initially “objective” narrator who gradually is drawn into the poem’s situation and starts to lose control…and then pulls the reader in, too. But the poet herself never loses control of the material. This stuff is really hard to pull off convincingly, requiring craft both in phrasing and in walking an emotional tightrope. But Addonizio does it repeatedly.
There is a wide range of subject matter in
Tell Me (often presented with an honesty that can shock, but not for the sake of shocking), all grounded in things real people care about—too many problems and too much drink (“Glass”); the world’s maddening and eerie mixture of evil with beauty (“Theodicy”); a mother and daughter, both prone to depression, making a non-suicide pact (“The Promise”); the wish that death will “pass over” a loved one (“Prayer”); the very human yearning to feel and experience life fully, and damn the consequences (“For Desire”); a lyrical imagining of long-ago lives, triggered during a walk by the ocean (“At Moss Beach”).
A great book.
Here’s a link to the Amazon page for Tell Me:
http://www.amazon.com/Tell-Me-Americ...ywords=tell+me
Best, Bruce