The Woman on the Bridge. ...: Poetry

by Allen R. Grossman

The Woman on the Bridge over the Chicago River  is Allen Grossman’s first collection with New Directions. His voice is astonishingly contemporary, his often dissociated imagery bordering on the surreal––yet one hears in his verse classical and Biblical echoes and, on occasion, darker medieval undertones. The brilliance of his imagination works against a measured eloquence, setting up a fine-edged tension not unlike the prophetic verse of William Blake, the wild dithyrambs of David, or the more controlled metrics of Catullus and Villon.

Genres: Poetry

82 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1979

Reviews

[Kent]

I read this just after Pennsylvania Collection Agency, by Burkard, and while that one made me think of the speaker's relationship with death, and how that can give him a sense of identity, this one made me look more at birth in that light. Both, though, seem very interested in maturing, and passing, parental relationships.

[Cooper Renner]

Its chief value is that it's primarily imagistic, not confessional. But for me the somewhat surrealist, objective-correlative images generally don't add up to a functioning whole.