Frank Sonnets

The ambitious fifth collection from Seuss (Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl) includes 120 sonnets that take the reader on a ride of wild abandonment and exuberance to counter the deaths (her lover's, her father's, and her friend Mikel's) that suffuse the work. While Seuss breaks conventional sonnet rules of meter and rhyme, these 14-line poems are both taut and free. "The sonnet," Seuss writes toward the end of the collection, "like poverty, teaches you what you can do/ without." She tackles addiction ("the brood of meth and Thunder-bird whose amniotic/ sacs were tinted blue he harrowed us unbarrowed us he sparrowed us/ and nailed us then he jacked our 7-Eleven and he hauled us up to heaven"), farm animals ("it's this spring the twin/ lambs seek, and yes it's green and yes it's sweet, without the tinny aftertaste/ of pail, and so they wander off the trail"); Jesus (''the most daddyish daddy-man of all"); and poverty ("finding out/ what I called violets was really petrified chicken shit"), finding lyricism in every corner. Seuss's intimate candor and musical ear make this an inventive and unforgettable book. (Mar.)

If there's one sentiment unifying this latest collection of free-verse sonnets from Seuss (Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl), it's her sense of alienation. As she notes in one poem, the nuns thought she "was odd and tried to foist me off/ on the Buddhists." In another poem, she mentions not having an "origin story, no soul." Another poem speaks ironically of being uncomfortable in her apartment with a dishwasher, while elsewhere she wonders whether everything is an apparition. Several poems remember her family, her grandfather's barber shop, and her great-grandmother or allude to the death of her father. Some have religious implications. Spinning these topics in a Jackson Pollack style, Seuss writes a stream-of-consciousness verse, with fragments rambling from one subject to another. VERDICT All in all, there's an awareness of the poet being separated--suggesting that she's writing the poem as a way to connect to absent loved ones--perhaps her son who lives far away from her, or her former lover, or departed family members, or even her own self. But is she? It's hard to pin down the meaning of a Seuss poem, which adds a certain pleasing sense of mystery to the best work here. --C. Diane Scharper, Johns Hopkins Univ., Baltimore, MD