[New-Poetry] Deborah Garrison

[TheOldMole]

Emily Bussbaum in the NY Times on Garrison's new book:

As the many fans of her first book would attest, the strength of 
Garrison’s poems is their ordinariness, in both language and subject 
matter. They are not pretentious. They speak to the reader directly: 
this is a conversation with a likable next-door neighbor rather than a 
scary visitation from a bipolar goddess. But this ordinariness is also 
Garrison’s weakness, and in “The Second Child” it can be glaring. Many 
of these poems are simply anecdotes of children being adorably profound: 
asking questions about death, struggling with the concept of infinity. 
Elsewhere, Garrison strives to celebrate domestic life but settles 
instead for cliché, as in one poem where she longs for more “voices that 
pierce / my heart utterly.”

...

It’s unfair, of course, to expect Garrison to be like Plath. She has her 
own gifts and an audience sure to appreciate them. In real life, I’d 
rather have a likable next-door neighbor than a bipolar goddess as a 
confidante. But in writing? Give me the strange mother over the sweet 
one any day.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/books/review/Nussbaum.t.html?ref=review



-- 
Tad Richards
http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/
http://opusforty.blogspot.com/