Voice-Over: Poems

Rating:
Summary: One of the best poets writing, Elaine Equi full of wisdom
Review: Elaine Equi's book starts with a quotation from Bakhtin about the personal intention in all art, and I find her book filled with that particular tilt. She has thre accuracy of a very draughtsman, the parrticularity that Fairfield Porter praised. Each of her poems seems as distinct as a political demand, and yet her unifiy-ing "personalism" is all over these Voice-overs. Her scale is no more small than Dickinson, and any true reader willbe amazed at how she economically dynbamizes space. She has learneds from many poets, and is a learned poet, but all this learnig is worn lightly. Take a poem like Little Landscape, where that phrase is immediately juxtaposed with "always at breast," so that, like a painting by the mythical Elstir, we do not know whether we dealing with body or landscape, but both, as in the ending: "The shadow pours itself/out on the grass." I find her poems erotic, maximal, surprising, and all with a reticence and charm that is supple and alive. Poetry of Equi is challenging, because it avoids l)mawkish melodrama 2)mawkish anti-sentimental mere "zaum" 3)moderate nothingness. She is subtle as a new reconstructivist and is an influence already on many. I lilke her total commitment to a very difficult art of precision, poignant precisions.

Rating:
Summary: Delightfully intelligent; the poem "made new"
Review: I have been a follower and fan of Elaine Equi's work for some time, and her new collection VOICE-OVER is her best to date. I whole-heartily recommend this beautifully crafted, balanced, intelligent and mysterious collection of poetry. VOICE-OVER begins with an epigraph from Bakhtin, "...[O]ne must take the word and make it one's own." Indeed the word, the poem, is reinvented, reconstrued, reconstructed, as Pound says, "made new" in Equi's wonderfully contemporary epigrams. This collection is an ars poetica: The sun sets./ The vase rests/ in the center/ of the poem. Equi draws poetry out of the minutia of everyday life, and it is that which makes this collection so fresh; who would guess where poems lurk for this fine poet. I laughed with delight when reading "Armani Weather" and "Remorse After Shopping." This is one collection I will return to again and again.