Praise Where Praise is Due

One of the driving motivations for this site has always been to encourage more candor, honesty, and wit in reviews of books of poetry. Now I know that this site is ultimately just another "fart in the whirlwind of the internet," as JP put it in a recent comment here, but hey, what can you do?

So on those rare occasions when I read a review that shows some guts and goes after a stinkbomb of a book or pops somebody's puffed rep, I feel all warm and fuzzy inside, and I wanna share the love. Unlike Garrick Davis of the Contemporary Poetry Review, Diana Manister has delivered the goods, producing as direct and incisive of a takedown as I've read recently and gracing us with a bit of real Menckenesque snark. Her subject: the very same book Davis disliked but waffled before, Mary Oliver's brain-splittingly awful, Why I Wake Early. I have a few problems with this review (why still give Oliver two and a half stars?) but it says what it means and avoids the deadening niceties that so infest poetry-speak these days.

Her review begins with a sentence that would have made the editors of the old Edinburgh Review proud: "The poet Mary Oliver is the Denny's Restaurant of American poetry: consistent and banal." Yes! Why can't we read more reviews like this?

Other choice morsels:

"A more sanguine poet might also see that the Lord's gift to the gull was probably an infestation of parasites that caused it to scratch..."

"A. R. Ammons, walking the beach in his great poem 'Corson's Inlet' saw 'everywhere life under seige.' Compared to him, Oliver is Mary Poppins."

"Take off your bonnet, Mary, it's too late to live in the Sixteenth Century."

And Manister doesn't let up in the end either, concluding: "Only poetry that asserts the presence of goodness while acknowledging evil can bring comfort in a world where children sent to school may be taken hostage or shot. Little Mary Sunshine doesn't get it done."

Indeed. Props to you, Diana Manister, for bringing it on. I hope I can buy you a beer someday and talk shop. If you ever want to guest post at Poetry Snark, let me know.