The Commandrine and Other Poems

by Joyelle McSweeney

The brilliance of Joyelle McSweeney's poems is a given; what remains delightfully open to negotiation are its methodologies and its mien. In her second book McSweeney finds her subjects in the long form; The Commandrine is a verse-play that in nine scenes tells the story of sailors Zest, Coast, Ivory, and Irish, and their run-in with the Devil.

Genres: Poetry

61 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2004

About the author

Joyelle McSweeney is a poet, playwright, novelist, critic, and professor at the University of Notre Dame. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard before earning an MPhil from Oxford and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

With Johannes Göransson, McSweeney founded and edits Action Books, an international press for poetry and translation. The press focuses on modern and contemporary works from Latin America, Asia, the US and Europe, including such major authors as Hiromi Itō, Kim Hyesoon, Aase Berg and Raul Zurita. Action Books seeks to move poetry and poetics from other literary cultures into the center of US poetry discussions and undermine the nationalist rubrics under which literature is marketed and discussed. In addition to the University of Notre Dame, McSweeney has taught in the MFA program at the University of Alabama and as a Visiting Associate Professor of Poetry at the Iowa Writers Workshop.

Reviews

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

In her second book, The Commandrine and Other Poems, Joyelle McSweeney executes an act of self-identification liberated from the confines of narrative, landscape, and body. The voice talks back at self with complete empathy for object as vessel of personal communion, a purer introspection than the world as mirror. Each image and word-image found in that interior serves in the continuous act of defining (defiantly in the face of matter) its maker by (rather than lashing words to facts) fashioning the necessary facts out of words. McSweeney treats words, like images, as instances of their precise contents rather than symbolic references, as reassemblies of exterior action into thought made more visceral. The world of the Commandrine is fluid and nameless, so words are momentary and exact like the seconds in which they exist, cannot be refused, and through their introverted infinitudes hyper-expand in a terrifyingly blithe example of form opening microcosms.

... [Read the rest of this review on The Burning Chair.

[Kristine · Rating 5 out of 5]

poems about ships and sailors. what more could you want.

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

I felt more of a connection with this than other McSweeney... maybe the verse/play format, the way the poems played off each other...? I loved "What I Eat is a Prayer," the last poem "The Born Fetus" "Youth Idiom," and especially the sounds and rhythm of "Application Ballad": I'd been spending my afterlife as a package of frozen chorizo/ when my sister touched me to her bruised cabeza./ I was released and flipped like a djinn/ to land with my fin in the sand...

[david · Rating 5 out of 5]

i've tweeted unnecessarily copious amounts about McSweeney, but, to suffice, an excerpt from "The Cockatoos Morose"

"... you are the boss when the boss is sleeping.
everyone is sleeping. when the boss does
something right -- every one will do everything right.
that is the secret of the boss.
you already have it.
that is the conclusion of the boss,
cockatoos."

<3

[Matt Walker · Rating 4 out of 5]

The fact that it contains my favorite kind of knot is reason enough to read it.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poetry as theater. Includes a verse play/play in verse that I love.

[Donald Armfield · Rating 3 out of 5]

Commandrine:in meaning (according to the poet) endured knowledge in a global economy. I could not get into this collection but definitely going to pick up MCSWEENEY’s other works.

Two poems that stood out for me:
-Application Ballad
-Innitiation

[Kyle Muntz · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book is all about getting punched in the face with language and liking it (and, umm, something about sailors as well). the poems are mostly long-form, demanding, written on the edge of absurdism; there's also a verse-play in the middle of the book that hints at the novels mcsweeney would write after this. i think i like those a little better, but this is still definitely worth checking out

[C. Varn · Rating 4 out of 5]

McSweeney seems in a mad revelry of language here: aurally dense, veering near absurdity, problematizing narrative, and yet remaining dramatic somehow. The verse play in the center of the text is fascinating. A wild read.