Modern Life: Poems

by Matthea Harvey (Goodreads author!)

published	2007 by Graywolf Press
binding	Paperback
isbn	1555974805 (isbn13: 9781555974800)
pages	80
description	Matthea Harvey’s Modern Life introduces a new voice that tries to exist in the gray area between good and evil, love and hate. In the cen...more [close] Matthea Harvey’s Modern Life introduces a new voice that tries to exist in the gray area between good and evil, love and hate. In the central sequences, “The Future of Terror” and “The Terror of the Future,” Harvey imagines citizens and soldiers at the end of their wits at the impending end of the world. Her prose pieces and lyrics examine the divided, halved self in poems about centaurs, ship figureheads, and a robot boy. Throughout, Harvey’s signature wit and concision show us the double-sided nature of reality, of what we see and what we know. [close]
date added	03-16-07 edit book

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Juliet rated it:

06/04/08

bookshelves: poetry

recommends it for: people who like clever yet random experimentation; people who like quirkily charming scenery

Overall, this book fluctuated between two stars and three and one half stars for me.

One more pro: a few of the poems at the end made me envision rather quirkily charming Amelie-esque scenes.

One more con: What kind of a poem is this?

YOU HAVE MY EYES

Give them back.

(And that's the entire poem. Seriously, what the heck is that? It's silly, stupid, and annoying.)

*************************************************************
I am still not quite finshed with this book, but af...more

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Peter rated it:

10/11/07

bookshelves: poetry

Read in September, 2007

Matthea Harvey, during her reading on September 16, stated that her new collection of poetry, Modern Life, dealt with the notion of halving. This trope of halves is well-established in the book's imagery, as centaurs, the Berlin Wall, a half-robot/half-boy, and other halves and halving mechanisms appear intermittently. These halves contribute to her book's rhythm, as well as its proportions and sense of space. The blank pages diving the book into sections seemed to pose questions concerning e...more Matthea Harvey, during her reading on September 16, stated that her new collection of poetry, Modern Life, dealt with the notion of halving. This trope of halves is well-established in the book's imagery, as centaurs, the Berlin Wall, a half-robot/half-boy, and other halves and halving mechanisms appear intermittently. These halves contribute to her book's rhythm, as well as its proportions and sense of space. The blank pages diving the book into sections seemed to pose questions concerning each section's autonomy: is the book itself an addition of fractions? Are the short poems fractions of the larger prose block? Are halves adequate, and if not, what are they lacking? "Halve" could also function as a simple pun, or "have." As I read the book, I sensed a undercurrent of yearning and longing that seeped up in at different points throughout the book. Many of Harvey's characters don't want to be halves, but their individual longings to have certain things help to provide the collection with an intimate sense of tension.

A restrictive form, such as the loose abecedarian patterning in Harvey's future/terror sequences, illuminates the poet's compositional freedom within a given set of parameters while exposing the poet's concurrent desire for unbounded creative expression. Harvey's future/terror poems are narrated by two discrete speakers - one military, one civilian - meaning that not only is the poetic form constrained, but the speakers' assumed personalities are occupationally bound. A soldier may not reveal a war's explicit details, while these very details are unaccessible from the civilian realm, and so forth.

Through all these formal restraints, each of Harvey's narratives achieves great movement. For example, the poem "Terror of the Future / 5" begins, "Technically, 'lonely me' was a tautology. / No one had ever stuffed carnations / in my tailpipe or planted a symbolic / lipsticked kiss on the swingdoor / to my kitchen" (65). Harvey's 21 future/terror poems are themselves something of a tautology, lending this particular piece to the book's meta-narrative. The future/terror poems topically confront our nation's war in Iraq, and mimic the obsessive recycling of stale war rhetoric, but they also speak to an emotional longing amplified in the book's trope of halves, such as being a single half in a relationship. Abecedarian, aside from meaning "arranged alphabetically," also gestures towards something rudimentary or elementary. The civilian is disconnected from the soldier, craving carnations, or a spike in banal domesticity. The personality of the soldier, physically separated by the book's midsection, is lost in the mindless repetition of soldierly life. Words are the sole passage between Harvey's characters, and a rudimentary source of human contact.

Modern Life is wonderfully arranged, utilizing the medium of the book as an amendment to the narrative. The harmony amongst black humor, sound values, poetic form, and other craft elements helps to refresh the somewhat clichéd notion of "modern life." Harvey's book illuminates the precarious world we live in, with its rampant commodification, arbitrary class distinctions, ambivalent peoples, and the sort. Harvey's satire, as a rhetorical strategy, absolves the text from didacticism and presents a fresh critique on the contemporary world.

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