The mind-body problem Poems

Katha Pollitt

Book - 2009

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Published
New York : Random House [2009]
Language
English
Main Author
Katha Pollitt (-)
Edition
First edition
Item Description
Poems.
Physical Description
xi, 82 pages ; 21 cm
ISBN
9781400063338
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

"Everywhere I look I see my fate," Pollitt writes, and she's not kidding. Studying the ragtag riders on a New York subway at night, she thinks "of Xerxes, how he reviewed his troops / and wept to think that . . ./ not one would be alive in a hundred years." The kitschy collectibles in a schoolyard rummage sale have crossed decades to deliver the message "that we lose even what we never had." "The Mind-Body Problem," Pollitt's second collection of poems (and her first in close to 30 years), is a book consumed not so much with mortality as with transience, of which mortahty is one aspect. Another is the way our most casual choices come to define us, a process Pollitt likes to enact by letting casual-seeming analogies take over whole poems. "Death can't help but look friendly / when all your friends live there," she writes in "Old," "while more and more / each day's like a smoky party / where the music hurts and strangers insist that they know you." In the poem's final lines you're still at that awful party, checking your watch and saying "to no one in particular,/ If you don't mind, I think I'll go home now." Pollitt knows how to pace a poem - where it ought to turn, tense and relax. She knows how many specifics she needs to save up in order to afford an abstraction, and how to cinch off a free-verse lyric with pentametrical certainty: "wrapped in white tissue paper, like a torch"; "the silent, bright elms burn themselves away." A few of the poems feel pat and rhetorical (Pollitt, a longtime columnist for The Nation, is persuasive for a living). But "The Mind-Body Problem" is an affecting and satisfying book.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 13, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review

Both essays and poems are arresting distillations of thoughts and feelings. So it makes sense that Pollitt, best known as an essayist in the Nation and collected at her acute best in Learning to Drive and Other Life Stories (2007), is also a fine poet. What is surprising is that it has taken her 27 years to publish her second poetry collection, following the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Antarctic Traveller, but it is well worth the wait. These are pithy, funny, wistful, and womanly wise poems so ingeniously metered one feels like applauding after each closing line. And beyond the pleasure of form and tone, there's Pollitt's marvelously philosophical and imaginative perceptions. She writes tenderly and ruthlessly about the ironies of aging, the poignancy of collectibles, the unexpected beauty of city streets, our inability to live life as if living were enough, and the perpetual fan dance of illusion and truth. As Pollitt ponders the Bible and Jane Austen, describes a standing heron as a question mark, and remembers the dead, she is at once irreverent and compassionate.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2009 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Pollitt now enjoys national fame for her political columns and her personal essays; she gained attention earlier, though, as a poet-Antarctic Traveller (1982) won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Twenty-seven years later, this second collection shows her fine ear and eye, urbane tones, attention to the ups and downs of middle age and motherhood, and her debts to Elizabeth Bishop, whose most ardent fans will find Pollitt at her worst derivative, but at her best a wise and worthy heir. "Shore Road" just rewrites Bishop's "Filling Station" ("somebody/ crew-cuts the crab-grass... puts out the plastic lawn chairs"). Poems about biblical scenes and characters seem thin compared to Bishop's prodigal son. Yet when Pollitt uses Bishop's careful and careworn tones for autobiography, she achieves wry, urbane retrospect and a power all her own: "Old Sonnets," for example, recalls Pollitt's undergraduate poetic ambitions; "Always Already" considers how the adult writer loses herself in the forest of other works, where "culture is a kind of nature,/ a library of oak leaves,/ muttering their foregone oracles." No one is likely to call Pollitt's verse radically new. Yet these poems can rise far above their promptings, as fleeting verse about an urban scene can rise to representative powers: often enough, Pollitt does. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

The bottom line in Nation essayist Pollitt's second poetry collection after her National Book Critics Circle Award-winning debut, Atlantic Traveler (1983), concerns the existence of God. Looking at neighbors, she wonders whether "this is all there is,/ all history's brought us here to our only life." Or, to paraphrase the title poem, while the body wishes to live simply, the mind's lofty spiritual notions get in the way. Even a poem about cats weighs in on "the probable odds of the soul's immortality." Mostly written in free verse, these poems are metaphysical but accessible, with meaning enhanced by figurative language, not lost in it. Their jewel-sharp imagery and tone of melancholic irony are somewhat reminiscent of work by Marianne Moore. Verdict Unlike much contemporary poetry, these understated poems say only what needs to be said. Although Pollitt writes of objects grounded in daily life, her work here seeks and generally finds transcendence; fans of Pollitt's nonfiction and poetry will heartily welcome this.-Diane Scharper, Towson Univ., MD (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Mind- Body Problem   When I think of my youth I feel sorry not for myself  but for my body. It was so direct and simple, so rational in its desires, wanting to be touched the way an otter loves water, the way a giraffe wants to amble the edge of the forest, nuzzling  the tender leaves at the tops of the trees. It seems unfair, somehow, that my body had to suffer because I, by which I mean my mind, was saddled with certain unfortunate high- minded romantic notions that made me tyrannize and patronize it like a cruel medieval baron, or an ambitious English- professor husband ashamed of his wife-- her love of sad movies, her budget casseroles and regional vowels. Perhaps my body would have liked to make some of our dates, to come home at four in the morning and answer my scowl with "None of your business!" Perhaps it would have liked more presents: silks, mascaras. If we had had a more democratic arrangement we might even have come, despite our different backgrounds, to a grudging respect for each other, like Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier fleeing handcuffed together, instead of the current curious shift of power in which I find I am being reluctantly dragged along by my body as though by some swift and powerful dog. How eagerly it plunges ahead, not stopping for anything, as though it knows exactly where we are going.     Lives of the Nineteenth- Century Poetesses   As girls they were awkward and peculiar, wept in church or refused to go at all. Their mothers saw right away no man would marry them. So they must live at the sufferance of others, timid and queer as governesses out of Chekhov, malnourished on theology, boiled eggs, and tea, but given to outbursts of pride that embarrass everyone. After the final quarrel, the grand renunciation, they retire upstairs to the attic or to the small room in the cheap off- season hotel and write Today I burned all your letters or I dreamed the magnolia blazed like an avenging angel and when I woke I knew I was in Hell . No one is surprised when they die young, having left all their savings to a wastrel nephew, to be remembered for a handful of "minor but perfect" lyrics, a passion for jam or charades, and a letter still preserved in the family archives: "I send you herewith the papers of your aunt who died last Tuesday in the odor of sanctity although a little troubled in her mind by her habit, much disapproved of by the ignorant, of writing down the secrets of her heart."     A Walk   When I go for a walk and see they're tearing down some old red- plush Rialto for an office building and suddenly realize this was where Mama and I saw Lovers of Teruel three times in a single sitting   and the drugstore where we went afterward for ice cream's gone, too, and Mama's gone and my ten- year- old self, I admire more than ever the ancient Chinese poets who were comforted in exile by thoughts of the transience of life.   How yesterday , for instance, quince bloomed in the emperor's courtyard but today wild geese fly south over ruined towers . Or, Oh, full moon that shone on our scholarly wine parties, do you see us now, scattered on distant shores?   A melancholy restraint is surely the proper approach to take in this world. And so I walk on, recalling Hsin Ch'i- chi, who when old and full of sadness wrote merely, A cool day, a fine fall.     Aere Perennius   The mugger leaping out with his quick knife, the waitress who does porno on the side, even the stray dog, methodically marking   the acidulated saplings one by one-- what are they but life insisting on its life, its own small heat, Don't let me pass away   with nothing to show for it, as the wind passes over the grass as though it had never been? Clouds give birth to themselves in the windy sky   over and over, last year's leaves lie quiet under last year's snow. That we're not these nor would be if we could is our whole meaning:   marble, murder, saxophones, lipstick, Nero wasting the empire for the Golden House in which he could live, at last, "like a human being." Excerpted from The Mind-Body Problem: Poems by Katha Pollitt All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.