 |
|
|
|
Reviews of books by some of the hottest writers working today, exclusive author interviews, literary news and criticism.
 |
|
|
|
|
Fill out your email address
to receive our newsletter!
|
|
|
|
|
 Get new reviews the instant they are posted to the site with RSS
What is RSS?
|
|
| Search Box (type in author's last name or one key word) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 There is variety. The bane of many chapbooks is a relentless sameness of tone. Ore in ‘Pop Quiz’ invites the reader to join her in play, to see what words really are if you must look at them as if you had never seen them before.
Reviewed by Bob Williams
Grammar of the Cage
by Pam Ore
Les Figues Press
2005, ISBN 0-9766371-2-X, $13.00, xiii + 59 pages
Pam Ore lives in Olympia, Washington. She has an MFA from Antioch University. Her poems have appeared in a number of magazines and reviews. This first collection of her poetry in a book results in a volume that is elegantly proportioned and beautifully designed. There is an introduction by Ingrid Wendt. It is friendly.
Those of us who live with animals have some notion of how, no matter how hard we avoid sentimentality, they can provide us with constant astonishments. Pam Ore, who was a zookeeper for ten years, shares her experiences with wild animals. What she sees is often sad, grim, and deplorable.
One may see the zoo as a necessity as well as a theater of pain. Ore can express either although sometimes the voice becomes more eloquent over the latter aspect. After describing the nocturnal wakefulness of zoo animals, she lets the behavior of the morning visitors speak for itself.
Dominating by daylight
hurling candy missiles,
they’ll try to wake up the lion,
make the bear move.
Ore’s titles are almost all very prosaic. ‘A Theory and Practice for Poetry in an Age of Extinction and Environmental Collapse’ captures a no-nonsense approach to titles. Unfortunately, the poem of which this is the title is not a poem: it is prose with the line breaks of poetry. Granted that she has an important message, this is a situation in which it is proper to shoot the messenger.
‘Scatter Creek, September’ restores one’s belief in Ore as a poet. It is too long to quote here and too much of a piece for excerpts, but it has the magic and the music one needs for conviction. ‘Saint. Say It’ is even more convincing. It reaches its rich fulfillment in these lines:
if you find the stars
beading up on your forehead
as you sniff out the fragrance
of saints
There is variety. The bane of many chapbooks is a relentless sameness of tone. Ore in ‘Pop Quiz’ invites the reader to join her in play, to see what words really are if you must look at them as if you had never seen them before.
Brevity is often Ore’s friend as if fewer words will get her into less trouble than many – example:
ANY LEAF
is a trigger
for a wind so sorry
it doesn’t matter
how the green moss glows again
or that the crow
is shaking out her black dress
into an afternoon
so clear
and blue
That crow is heart-stoppingly right.
Although there is much admirable in Grammar, there is some that fails. Poetry traffics in revelations, but the poet’s revelations are not mine unless the poet makes them so. Ore sometimes doesn’t transform her revelations, and I can acquiesce in what she says without being moved by it. Where poetry is concerned, this constitutes an empty relationship. Because she is a poet of great promise, she is worth the reader’s time but the reader should be warned that she sometimes makes promises that she doesn’t keep.
About the Reviewer: Bob Williams is retired and lives in a small town with his wife, dogs and a cat. He has been collecting books all his life, and has done freelance writing, mostly on classical music. His principal interests are James Joyce, Jane Austen and Homer. His book Joyce Country, a guide to persons and places, can be accessed at: http://www.grand-teton.com/service/Persons_Places
|
|
|
|
|
|
