Word: poem
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Canada: there is geography in her poems, and by inference she builds a tension around her expatriation. She mentions Canada again in her "Two Campers in Cloud Country," a what-I-did-last-summer-vacation-poem; her "Sleep in the Mojave Desert" harks to Joan Didion's feelings for the deserts of Southern California. One poem "On Deck" opens with "Midnight in the Mid-Atlantic," and in several of her poems the landscapes are interchangeably Massachusetts, Wales, and Ireland. Of the last of these "Wuthering Heights," the most remarkable as a poem, betrays here ambivalence to the wilderness most strongly...
...poems, "Witch Burning," one of the better works in the collection, and "Whitsun", an unimpressive piece, she sees herself as an American heroine with a Scarlet Letter on her breast. At times she rings of Emily Dickinson, "A bodiless soul could pass another soul. In this clear air and never notice it--", from the "Widow" a poem of the fantasies of grief clearly about her mother. A much less proficient poem "Black Rook in Rainy Weather" recalls in tone and subject to Robert Frost's "Dust of Snow" about the crow and the saving of a day he had rued...
...Your writers show a sad lack of knowledge of black literature. The poem that you quoted in your Attica story, supposedly written by an inmate, is actually by Claude McKay, one of the first major Negro poets...
...interest, but the fact remains that not much good poetry is being written, and not much of the Advocate's wide-ranging selection is good. Lucien Styrk's "The Unknown Neighbor" is only one example of verse that gets by only by not trying very hard. When a poem looks only like a carefully written sentence chopped up into verses, it's clearly written with a misunderstanding of what makes poetry. "The Unknown Neighbor" is an effectively elegaic recollection with an unnecessary stinger for a last line; it's the most obvious example in the Advocate of a style...
...poem in the Advocate collection stands out as a bright example of intention happily wedded to execution: Jean Boudin's "Checkers." On one level it is a word-game played in nonsense verse with a vivaciously comic sense for awkward syntax and incongruous internal rhyme. Boudin writes for the ear at least as well as she writes for the eye. And her sense of nonsense saves the radical political themes of the poem from didacticism. An attempt at high seriousness would blunt the sting of the poem's political barbs, but irreverence sharpens them with a fitting context. A poet...