The angel-filled St. Bonaventure Cemetery, made famous by John Behrendt’s MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL Several years ago, contains the grave of Conrad Aiken, friend of T. S. Eliot at Harvard and beyond, winner of the Poetry Society of America’s first Shelley Award, and now best known for his frequently anthologized story “Silent Snow, Secret Snow.”  At the age of eleven, Aiken watched his physican father kill his mother, then himself.  The latter two are entombed together in standing More...

Jill Bialosky, Intruder (Knopf, 2008)

I read Jill Bialosky's The End of Desire a few years back, and found it enjoyable enough if rough around the edges. Reading Intruder, I was ready to proclaim that the edges had been smoothed out and Bialosky had really found her voice here. Then I got to the fifth section of the book, and it all came back.

“This is how she imagines it. A stillness.
He enters the room and is not afraid.
Once the poet watched a fence being torn More...

My favorite here was "Dreaming of Two World Coexisting in Harmony" because she was having some fun there. I found a few of these to be repeats: hitting the same tone, language, subject, POV, topic several times in the volume so that it felt one-note. I liked the "Intimacies" sequence, especially "Family Vacation": "the one-armed man, what casualty befalls him?" and "The dog of some uncertain pedigree/ digs his paws into the sand."

This was a good collection of poems. There were a few experiments in structure that didn't really work, and the poem about surfers was such a juvenile theme that it really didn't belong with the rest of her work here. She is at her best when teetering between abstract and concrete, every day and surreal.