World's Tallest Disaster

Rating:
Summary: Answer Me This
Review: Cate Marvin doesn't simply write with emotion, she carefully and intellectually examines a feeling and displays it for us to ponder. I tend to be more of a Yeats person myself and was pleasantly surprised to see that Marvin is reaching toward that goal of combining lyric with absolute truth. She is young and is not ashamed to be expressing the sensitivities of the young but within her you can see a potential that should delight all of us in the future. If old WBY were sitting up on a cloud, he'd be smiling.

Rating:
Summary: live free or die
Review: Marvin deserves credit for the occasionally okay turn of phrase, (ie. "the hole of our mouths holds a howl"), but for the most part these poems are tiresome, hysterical, and pretentious. So many of these poems assert huge psychic distress, even madness, in the face of--what? Bad dates? Middle-class frustration? The rhetoric and imagery is whipped up to an intensity that's almost comic considering the poem's actually quite banal subject matter. This is the self-importance of the pampered, educated classes who have read Petrarch, been in therapy, watched a lot TV, but have never really experienced life.

Check out Judy Jordan's _Carolina Ghost Woods_ for poetry which explores states of psychological intensity and situations beyond those you'd see on an episode of "Friends."

Rating:
Summary: Enjoyable Pain
Review: Marvin's poetry drips with anger, pain, and lost love. None of these are new to poetry and are often overdone. Yet Marvin's poems are different and the strong, clear emotions are part of a strange enjoyment of them. The first poem "Reader, Please" is not a typical welcome to a collection, but a door slammed in the face, the "please" saying I don't need or want sympathy. A lot of contemporary poetry steers away from unpleasant emotion while Marvin wraps both hands around them and dares us to read about it. Other favorite poems include "Why Sleep," "Landscape Without You," "Please," "The Articulate," and "The Readership" with great play on the ship in readership. I also suspect some influence of Berryman in her poem, "The Condition" which begins "what we share most is boredom, friend."

Rating:
Summary: masochistic, innocent, intense
Review: Might as well just buy the book now. Even if you don't like poetry, years from now--when she's anthologized as one of our great contemporaries--Marvin's debut collection will be worth quite a penny.

If you do like poetry (for reasons other than that recommended by your financial advisor), then you're also in luck. Within these pages are 40 crisp, little works of art. Each one a microcosmic, exacting sculpture of words. Tiny chocolate treats cooked by a mad chef. (Quite mad). Yes, underneath the formal plasticine wrapping is nothing less then pure, chaotic screaming.

The result is addiction. Take for example, a golden nugget called "The Anniversary".

The poem begins with the Romantic-esque woe of "Disappointment with the lack of stars." And like the Romantic sing-song of Prufrock's opening, "Let us go then, you and I/When the evening is spread out against the sky" that quickly hinges from sweet to 20th Century rationalism-gone-wrong with the following line "Like a patient etherised upon a table;" Marvin too hinges her tone from Romantic to a part Plathian/part Verunica Salt nature, as she demands "where's the moon when I call it?/Perhaps it's not up to being the color/I want tonight: bloody orange, peeling light." That's only the beginning of a sharp poem filled with intense passion and lines like "I wear his eyes like rings/on my hands. I sew years into a dress."

I won't write an entire thesis for an amazon.com review, but bear in mind, this is one of those rare books whose poems can be read alone, when in a foul mood; or together, sprinkling rose petals on a lover's body. I look forward to a lifetime of reading her work.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant, Beautiful, and sometimes Scathing
Review: The poems in The World's Tallest Disaster seem to me very often word by word perfect, poems that knocked the breath out of me a little. In the spirit of Plath and Larkin, the poems can be caustic, funny, and beautiful (and yeah even cruel) all at the same time. They bring to life a consistent personality behind the words, even though, as Pinsky states in the introduction, the poems don't belong to any one particular school. The voice or persona (or whatever you want to call it) is blunt and trustworthy with an eloquent and disarming honesty. The language is always there. It's the best collection I've read in years.

Rating:
Summary: marvinlous
Review: the speaker in Cate Marvin's fluent, coolly intelligent--inherent, unpretentious--eerily prophetic volume (by far the most admirable edition in the Kathryn A. Morton prize series), "lives where the leaves are pointed," and from that vantage point, penetrates with wrenching accuracy.

Rating:
Summary: marvinlous
Review: the speaker in Cate Marvin's fluent, coolly intelligent--inherent, unpretentious--eerily prophetic volume (by far the most admirable edition in the Kathryn A. Morton prize series), "lives where the leaves are pointed," and from that vantage point, penetrates with wrenching accuracy.