Letter to Mimi Khalvati Dear, how I hate the overblown diction of
lines for occasions: festschrifts, like elegies
making a banal birthday seem to
signpost a passage to unmapped wasteland,
...
This book is very intelligent and meticulously composed, but its poetry doesn't move me. I appreciate the writer's fine skill, but the writing feels too structured and intellectual in spite of the book's themes of women in the Middle East and America's role in disrupting societies. The author chooses to write in obscure poetry forms: ghazals, gloses, sonnets; which I don't find particularly appealing nor contributory to expressing Hacker's thoughts. One of the reviews on the back cover states "Marilyn Hacker's language saves us through its brilliant riches, its coruscating threnodies of structure." Yes, there are brilliant rich lines, but I get lost in artificial structure and it feels like Hacker is trying too hard. It feels like a book more for college literary professors to dissect rather than one for the average poetry lover.
No comments:
Post a Comment