Deer Table Legs: Poems (Contemporary Poetry Series (Univ of Georgia Pr))

Rating:
Summary: totally original
Review: "Deer Table Legs" breaks poetry open in the service of consciousness. Cleary this poet has an original vision, without alliegances to the pseudo-avant-garde. Read this book.

Rating:
Summary: Deer Table Legs is the impressive debut of a singular voice.
Review: Katayoon Zandvakili's Deer Table Legs is the impressive debut of a singular voice. The poems contain beautiful images, surprisingly juxtaposed, that chart the complex journey of a love affair which exists both in the concrete physical world and the fragile world of spiritual connection. This tension between the physical and the spiritual finds an analog in the language and references as well. Poems soar from the mythic and historical to Sam Shepard to convenience stores and car-trips, describing the heights and depths of an intense love in language that discovers beauty and clarity in everyday diction. Zandvakili is a poet of the personal only in so much as she finds the universal in details. She is an explorer. Reading through this challenging and moving book, I am reminded of what Donald Barthelme said in response to a criticism that his work was too obscure: "Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, rather because it wishes to be art. However much the writer might long to be straight-forward, these virtues are no longer available to him. He discovers that in being simple, honest, straight-forward, nothing much happens." Very much happens in Deer Table Legs, and this book rewards a diligent reader who is open to discovery. Above all the book is a true one, true in impulse and execution, the only necessary criterion for literature. Zandvakili has delivered something exciting and extraordinary, and Deer Table Legs deserves every award and accolade it has received.

Rating:
Summary: A Sundry Aglomeration of Images
Review: What passes for poetry today is taxing to the true spirit of the tradition. Deer Table Legs and the poems therein are the perfect example of what Harold Bloom warns us about in his essay in The Best of the Best American Poetry: "the barbarians are about us and we must retain the heights." No music in the lines, inattention to traditional meters, lack of vision, and ill-afforded ennui are the faults found in this book. We must demand higher standards if poetry is to survive into the next century.