Doggerel Not Included
2007; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 28; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/abr.2007.0139
ISSN2153-4578
Autores Tópico(s)Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies
ResumoSchneiderman continuedfrom previous page slightly more believable topos than the interior-aslandscape structures of Melancholy's set pieces. In the earlier collection, the fictional world exhibits a sort of magical realist fabulism, and the stories forego any ultimate explanation of the astounding plot structures. Accordingly, the reader never feels settled, and the stories betterexploit the metaphorical and métonymie implications oftheir exposed bodily systems. Yet in HalfLife, in perhaps its only fault, we experience an equally intense magical realism that ultimately, to some small extent, explains too much about how Nora and Blanche come to experience their adult world. Specifically, Half Life loosely alternates between two (of course) time-streams: in the present, Nora seeks to remove Blanche, who, she fears, is starting to awake (and throw things). In the alternating chapters, Nora relives her childhood with the still-sentient Blanche in Too Bad, Nevada, and this remembered childhood offers no shortage offraught moments for the twins: their mother's attempts to abort (she swallows a scorpion "between two slices of white bread"), their father's totemic dollhouse (a replica or mold for an English manor, and a central theme ofthe book), their caretakers's success in turning Too Bad into a tourist ghost town, their paternal grandmother's exploding gas station, their first sexual exploits with the "mildly retarded" Chris Marchpane, and, most noxiously, their neighborly nemesis Dr. Goat, extrapolated from a picture book, who keeps a foul-mouthed animal-girl/princess that Nora and Blance call "Donkey-skin" locked in a cage. In these childhood vignettes, Blanche is as much a force as Nora, although the latter dominates her seemingly weaker and perhaps more comely sister with elaborate tales of"Thin Air," a "barren place ofcubes and planes" where their erased drawings are set free. This past narrative begins to catch up with the present strand after Nora's return from England and her stint with The Unity Foundation (where tiny animals communicate with her in otherwordly episodes). Then, the elaborately remembered Donkey -skin segments—culminating in the grisly end of Dr. Goat, as the girls inhabit the decomposing carcass of an (interrupting) cow from their desert dead-animal zoo—assumes a psychological dimension (and explanation) that, while not at odds with the perfectly acceptable narrative resolution, perhaps breaks too much from the wonder of twins' world. Imagine the best episodes of the cult-classic Twin Peaks (1990-1991) (although Half Life is better than all of those), at least suggesting that some of the drivingly absurd fantasy was too much for even David Lynch to leave unexplained. At this final moment, and only at this moment, HalfLife mildly missteps, but with a text so rich and provocative (I haven't mentioned even an eighth of the wonders therein), and a hook so wild, the reader won't have time to do much more than read and reread , perhaps over her own shoulder. Davis Schneiderman is co-editor of ReTaking the Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age ofGlobilization (Pluto, 2004). He is the chair oftheAmerican Studies Program at Lake Forest College. Doggerel Not Included Charlotte Pence Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems Robert Wrigley Penguin http://www.penguin.com 192 pages; paper, $20.00 Ifyou're a poet inclined to write about the family dog—oreven yourchildhood dog—then you better manipulate language akin to a MOMIX contortionist or actually offer new insights. And Robert Wrigley does. From the quiver of the dog's flattened ears as die girl hisses, "Say it," commanding the dog to say he loves her, to the stolid boy who knows his dog is as good as dead when the farmer arrives with claims of a gutted chicken and asks, "Thatcher Bitchboy?," Wrigley's poems hunker down and quickstep away from our expectations. Earthly Meditations: New andSelected Poems is Wrigley's first book published since Lives of the Animals in 2003, which won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. This book serves as a needed collection of selected work from a poet who only recently started publishing everywhere (or to be more precise: the right "wheres" such as Poetry, The New Yorker, and Slate). In almost thirty years of publishing poetry books, one...
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