Word: sagan
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...themes that "I" or "we" favors: themes like the sea, a woman's sexuality, a sort of science-fictionalized view of the world, the family history and tawdry yet mysterious American middle- or working-class culture. These themes hold small clumps of otherwise disparate poems together while Sagan is trying out styles of writing. They provide, at least, a way of fitting her work together which makes the overview possible in a collection more satisfying than a chance encounter with her verse in, say, Mademoiselle, Samisdat magazine or The Harvard Advocate (where 11 of this selection of 16 poems have...
...COUPLE of Sagan's most successful poems belong to the last of these thematic categories. Each brings to mind a genre of music and the environment it thrives in. "Edge of the Blues" is explicitly modeled after the sinuous, superstitious rhythm of jazz, blues and gospel. The stanzas wind through snatches of borrowed lyrics and a pair of lines reminiscent of a slave song, whose plea has been transported into a scene of city night life: "Just show me God, quick./Then let me sleep./...and all the soft windows of the neighborhood/are darkening, one by one." There...
...neat structure of "The Order of Things" is built from items strewn inside a bay. In this surrealistic fantasy, where the images are as barren as those on a Dali canvas, Sagan plays liquids and sybillants, especially, against each other as she describes old women "down by red rock steps" who "sit in the sea up to their breasts." It is rare for her to take advantage of vowels and consonants this way--this might even be the only case where she uses such a technique...
...Sagan's style isn't always consistent or striking, it seems, at least, pretty much her own. When she wedges the hard brutality of Nazi extermination camps between two lovers in their bed, you are tempted to compare her poetry with the self-punishing irony of Sylvia Plath, but you don't get very far before Sagan pulls up short, insisting, "and those things I will not look...
...CHAPBOOK'S cover features a nude by Degas--apparently it could double for the "dangerous body" in one of the narrative poems. Degas's subject does indeed convey the emphatic sensuality that figures in Sagan's conception of women. Sagan's women are wrapped up in their own sexuality, even tormented by it. One craves bloody flesh; another, the Russian named Ytrasie, whose romanticism pushes her into rather appealing heroism, has black braids which "flew out like whips." Yet they are frightened of their own desires, and tend to suppress them. As a result, they remain unfulfilled or their bodies...