I, too, am glad to see Ariel nominated, and almost did it myself. I don't like every poem in the book, but my first encounter with it was breathtaking. The power of that relentless voice, the rhythms that she had internalized from years of working in rhyme and meter, the startling images--they all spoke to me of passion and a control that was teetering on the edge of being out of control. She was breaking every taboo there was, and it was riveting and rather scary to watch.
I didn't like how hard I needed to work to understand some of the poems, how elliptical they were. Sometimes it felt as if she were writing for herself and really didn't care whether the reader could follow her. But the poems were so urgent that I wanted to understand them, and once I found out more about her life, I could make sense of most of them. Even without understanding them, I could sense that they had their own internal logic, like a nightmare.
Susan
|