Review by New York Times Review
Hadas is sometimes classified as a New Formalist, but it's a misleading and restrictive label, seeing as how she has mixed free and formal verse ever since her 1975 debut, "Starting From Troy." Some of her previous 14 volumes possess cool, classical surfaces and meditate like essays in abstract language. Still, her best poems have always used form to control the undercurrents of feeling and have increasingly fixed on the personal - love, loss and the sublime, including the uncanny power of dreams, her own and "some unguessed-at stranger's." The most powerful poems in her latest book, "The Golden Road," build from "Strange Relation," her 2011 memoir of her husband's decline into dementia. "Boston Naming Test" reprises the facts of one chapter but transforms them forcibly: her husband's silence becomes "a sheet of paper either blank / or scribbled over with an alphabet / nobody can read" and "a calm sea / closing over your head." Her array of metrical forms is impressive too, but she deploys them flexibly so that some seemingly free poems are really measured, with varied line lengths. This powerful, autumnal book ends elegantly: the title poem makes Hadas's personal story universal through the archetypes of season, sunlight and a curving road, where the speaker sees her son coming the opposite way and grasps how "the living pass the dead."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [April 14, 2013]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Meaning depends on close observation in this book, which begins, "Once you see the pattern, it recurs:/ origin, journey, wound, and destination." Hadas presents a poised journey through different kinds of loss, seeking not lamentation but discovery. Through poems closely married to form, even while breaking it, Hadas observes patterns ("As leaves fall, so it is with men"), questions patterns ("What is there to prepare for?"), and comes to terms as she moves toward and through what she accepts as inevitable: "There is no other way to move but onward./ Not that winter's over yet; and not// that spring is imminent. But change is constant." A husband's slow decline and a friend's suicide form the elegiac undercurrent of this work, where "The question isn't whether/ he recognizes me but whether I/ recognize him. There isn't any answer," where even in the oblivion-grip of memory loss "each object's still the entrance to a world/ of story and association," and where all causeways that run through the book culminate in the elegant title poem that throws this "origin, journey, wound, and destination" into brilliantly sharp relief: "On a September road I met my son/ walking the other way," it begins, "I had the hill/ to climb; he was returning from a run." (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In her latest volume (after The Ache of Appetite), Hadas centers her poems on the themes of memory, loss, and love in pieces that have been richly crafted in traditional forms as well as free verse. These poems follow the twisted process of loss, particularly the long-standing dementia and death of her husband, composer George Edwards. Solace seems to come from the act of writing, which becomes the act of retaining memory: "the medium of ambivalence being verse/ and I the mistress of the might-have-been.a territory poems flourish in." These poems flourish on planes and ferries, in parks, and in the Greek islands, imbued with mythology. In pieces that are both lament and meditation, Hadas takes readers on her journey from the neurology department of a hospital where her husband fails his naming test to the poet contemplating Bishop and Heraclitus and the river that is both a symbol of life and change. Dedicating these poems to her husband and son, Hadas acknowledges that "The gold road curves./ The living pass the dead./ Old and young acknowledge one another;/ then take separate paths ahead." VERDICT Highly recommended for all contemporary collections.-Karla M. Huston, Appleton Art Ctr., WI (c) Copyright 2012. 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.
