Vauxhall

by Catherine Daly

Poetry. VAUXHALL is pitched where voice and experience coincide. The poems sing and dance through heavenly mansions and real bungalows, tourist traps and museums, pharmacies and vending machines. VAUXHALL is a calendar. It's an "all occasion" greeting and gift. The Hollywood pitch for VAUXHALL might have been "Marianne Moore meets Joan Jett" or "Alexander Pope goes to night school." Like the pleasure garden once called "Fox's Hill" which gives this book its title, VAUXHALL puts emotion in Place because things are alone or entire after they have been torn or leased or unmoored. Or, to quote rather than rephrase Yeats, "Love has pitched his mansion in / The place of excrement; / For nothing can be sole or whole / That has not been rent." Catherine Daly is also the author of CHANTEUSE/CANTATRICE, LOCKET, and DADADA, all available from SPD.

Genres: Poetry

97 pages, Paperback

First published April 15, 2008

Reviews

[Patricia · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book of poetry took a while to read. For me, it was not exactly accessible thought I doubt if this was Daly's intention. Instead, I think the intention was more to delve into language--to explore phonology, morphology, and semantics. I often felt that the work was going over my head, was simply too sophisticated for me, in part because I was unfamiliar with some of the referents, golf for example and even some of the pop culture images. I could feel the musicality of the work and actually wished I could hear them read aloud. I'm glad I hung in there and read all of these poems for I feel I've been exposed to poetry of a different shape and color than that which I'm typically drawn to--more narrative stuff.