Margaret and Dusty; Poems Book

Not quite as revelatory as Incidentals in the Day World or At Night The States, though there is strength and charm here, perhaps the funniest of Notley's books I have read (e.g., [of her two sons] "they're unbelievable Bohemians, they/ cough a lot." ; "I'm / mad at you still / for being as right as / I was so passionately myself") Perhaps out of context it doesn't pack the punch, but Notley is and always will be about her strange contextual shifts and turns in the flow of language, some that shock, some that crack you up in their newness and simultaneous eternal character, which makes you feel weird and excited for poetry's possibility all at once. Some on this site speak of this being her at her "New-York-School-iest," which is to say it feels (to me) as if she is holding back the most, all the scraps seem broken into parsable separate lines here (into dialogue, observation, internal thought) and sorting them out through the poem's voice seems doable'this is unlike the general blended (and unparsable) effect of emergence I have come to love of Notley, what Dana Ward calls in his great contemporary epic poem "Typing 'Wild Speech'", her "pure prosody."

Which is all a long and nicer way to say this is good for fans of Alice, and good for fans of Ted, and good for fans of the New York School, and great for fans of poetry, but it is not Notley's best, but so it is still better than your average very good book of poetry, so read it, but also please read At Night the States and Incidentals in the Day World, which are both collected in the indispensable Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems, 1970-2005.