I Can't Remember: Poems

by Cynthia Macdonald

"Cynthia Macdonald's poems are quite extraordinary in their range and daring. She is brilliantly versatile in adopting the views, attitudes, or moods of fictive or actual persons different from herself, and she does so with a delicate empathy. She can be remarkably witty, as well as deeply moving, and sometimes even ruthless in her insights, which are more like X rays than snapshots. She is a poet of many skills and formidable dexterity."
--ANTHONY HECHT

This book further extends the range of Cynthia Macdonald's ambition and achievement. From the beginning her poems have read like letters from the unconscious, full of wit, drama, invention, and intelligence. In the last decade, without sacrificing those pleasures, her work has deepened, becoming more passionate, more lyrical; the language, as Edmund White described it, "silvery, transparent, harmonious."

All these qualities remain, but to them has been added a kind of wisdom about where we are, where we have been, and where we may be going. She asks questions more often than she gives answers, testifying that "what is clear is never really clear."  Yet the reader closes the book bathed "in the clarifying light that glances off the winter road,"  and in the feeling of desire of "Vermeer's Lady Reading at an Open Window."

Praising Cynthia Macdonald's poems, Carol Muske once noted that they "alter everything we take for granted in poetry,"  and, in another review, Liz Rosenberg remarked on the poems' "gorgeous, almost baroque quality.  Her work continues to surprise and please--and disturb."

78 pages, Hardcover

First published October 15, 1997

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Reviews

[Angela]

I remember reading this a long time ago and only liking one poem...but it was one of the best poems I'd ever read, something to do with mortality and accepting one's fate. I was awaiting my encounter with this poem again, but it never materialized. The only thing that remains the same upon my rereading is that I still only liked one poem.

Cynthia Macdonald's poetry is the kind of poetry that I should like: not formal, but obvious thought goes into internal rhyme, assonance, and consonance. Her poems feel deliberate. Unfortunately, they are rarely wonderful and I thought most of the poems were such wasted opportunities. There's an entire section on chickens: cockfighting; a Jewish chicken compares a barbecue to the Holocaust; a poet chicken is enraged by being asked about why they cross the road; and more! There are several poems on art and artists (Bruegel, Leonardo, Cassatt, Vermeer) but I've never read a poem that comes close to capturing the essence of an artwork, and Macdonald's are no exception. There are a few historical poems about costume makers or child cartographers that are at least novel ideas, but still aren't great.

Poems that I liked: "What is Never Lost," "Their Places Resolve and Dissolve" (part I only).
=1.25/36 (3.5%) poems that I liked.