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Monkey Lightning
Poetry. Martha Zweig's fourth collection of poems is her strongest. With a voice and verbal texture like no other contemporary poet's, she transfigures the sonorous traditional English lyric with an audacity that's rugged and unruly but sublimely literary. Zweig's etymological wizardry recalls the intoxicating wordplay of the rustics and faeries in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. Yet in their dramatic candor, Zweig's new poems are also as bull's-eye direct as John Berryman's blues-drenched Dream Songs. From the howling, buzzing, frosty reaches of the north woods we bring you...MONKEY LIGHTNING! The best work yet by a virtuoso conjuror.
- GenresPoetry
92 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 2010
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
August 14, 2010
"Really, does the world /cry out for narrative?" Maybe so. This line appears in "Random Dirt Road Poem" from Zweig's _Monkey Lightning_. Although many of the poems in Zweig's collection reverberate with word play, the most memorable selections (for me) are the ones that contain stories that surprise.
I have never before read a poem in which a "live / potato" appears on a talk show where questions will be screened by "Elsie...who also / has spread herself wide for somebody's butter / & fork & says she has not liked it." I had also never read a poem in which a heavy speaker takes her condition so lightly: "I am so fat that my whole body gets in my way. / 'Will you just quit crowding me!' I yell."
One of my favorite poems bears a title that I think sums up the general attitude of Zweig's collection as a whole. "In Levity" begins with the speaker longing for colorful, reticulated wings like that of a migrating monarch butterfly, then shifts into other illusionist flights: "What loops aloft after its prey? / A crab thinks a fish does." The speaker recalls her father with kite "knotted on his trout rod." "Maybe / he's turned into a butterfly?" she suggests, then quickly negates: "Notice me doubt it." The poem's concluding stanza grants fabric object a lightness that transcends hunger (physical or spiritual):
Look how a kite doesn't need! It's a made thing.
It's why the line tugs. _Don't listen to
a word I say_ is the one proposition the kite
--a risen ear--diverts & buoys against prayer.
Such a playful object, a toy, defies gravity, solemnity. It cannot take itself seriously and, so, has no need for intercession from higher power.
I like Zweig's voice, despite the occasional archaic diction ("erstwhile," "sipt," and "o" appear, for example, in the levity poem). I could certainly do with fewer ampersands. As they appeared repeatedly in almost every poem, I began to get distracted. Oh, no, it's another one, I thought--then, had to force myself to concentrate on content. I expect Zweig has adopted this stylistic tic for the same reason lucille clifton chooses not to capitalize. They're part of her shtick. Some readers may find them appealing.
I have never before read a poem in which a "live / potato" appears on a talk show where questions will be screened by "Elsie...who also / has spread herself wide for somebody's butter / & fork & says she has not liked it." I had also never read a poem in which a heavy speaker takes her condition so lightly: "I am so fat that my whole body gets in my way. / 'Will you just quit crowding me!' I yell."
One of my favorite poems bears a title that I think sums up the general attitude of Zweig's collection as a whole. "In Levity" begins with the speaker longing for colorful, reticulated wings like that of a migrating monarch butterfly, then shifts into other illusionist flights: "What loops aloft after its prey? / A crab thinks a fish does." The speaker recalls her father with kite "knotted on his trout rod." "Maybe / he's turned into a butterfly?" she suggests, then quickly negates: "Notice me doubt it." The poem's concluding stanza grants fabric object a lightness that transcends hunger (physical or spiritual):
Look how a kite doesn't need! It's a made thing.
It's why the line tugs. _Don't listen to
a word I say_ is the one proposition the kite
--a risen ear--diverts & buoys against prayer.
Such a playful object, a toy, defies gravity, solemnity. It cannot take itself seriously and, so, has no need for intercession from higher power.
I like Zweig's voice, despite the occasional archaic diction ("erstwhile," "sipt," and "o" appear, for example, in the levity poem). I could certainly do with fewer ampersands. As they appeared repeatedly in almost every poem, I began to get distracted. Oh, no, it's another one, I thought--then, had to force myself to concentrate on content. I expect Zweig has adopted this stylistic tic for the same reason lucille clifton chooses not to capitalize. They're part of her shtick. Some readers may find them appealing.
Displaying 1 of 1 review