Reviews for The Disappearing Trick

The average rating for The Disappearing Trick based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-04-11 00:00:00 Vicki Richman While the first few poems do not grab the reader, sticking it out past that leads to some rewarding reading. Roberts is excellent at establishing mood. The prevailing moods within this work are loss and regret--but within those there is a wide range of emotion. In many cases memories are called up which seem to hint at regret or sorrow without giving in to a simple wallowing in self-pity as a lesser author might do. Often times the memories are intertwined with the narrator's current activities and the two become blurred and it is obvious the memory is so strong that the narrator's focus has become split. The present is recalling the past which in turns intrudes on the present so much as to be as real now as it was then, if not, in some cases more real now that time and maturity have increased the narrator's understanding of the past events and their impact. Overall the Disappearing Trick succeeds in being a confession of the dreariness of a life without being blatantly or superficially dreary. The reality made concrete by several poems referring to the same events/places/people, the dreariness made more real by the poems' ability to recall these things with obvious remorse without attempting to explain how dreary it is. While some of these do not work well "The Failed Trick" for example (from which the book title is derived) moves too fast and to a conclusion that feels surprisingly thin and amatuer, the majority work very well. Roberts shows snippets of a life (or lives) affected by many things from childhood to adulthood, and thankfully does not try to set the poems into any chronoligical order based on the events. Pervasive in all this is the feeling that nothing was going to turn out spectacular for the narrator. You can see this in the poems about a childhood with a drunk father, long-declining in health and a mother who just walks away from it all. From youth to early adulthood the narrator has the discovery of who he is and of life around him, but it is never a celebration, indeed even the teenage pasttime of sex at the drive-in ends as banal and uninspiring as the movie that was the pretext for going to the drive-in. Adulthood is a mixed struggle of a now that is both colored by and frequently haunted by the past. Friends and relatives die, memories of their good health and their lingering ill health intrude on a gray existence that seems resigned to accept without lamenting what is and what these memories suggest will be.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-09-23 00:00:00 Chris Burrows Wow and wow again. How have I wated this long to come to Kelly's work? What I love most, I think, is how she makes vast music from simple things. She lives in a simple, domestic (although outdoor domestic) world. And yet. How does she manage to move into dream, myth, fear without seeming overwrought? There's a quiet description that seems very characteristic and that aids in this, I think, and that grounds the work. Deer, orchards, lying on the ground, birds... and the fears that come out of even the manicured-lawn dark. She's a Freudian poet, in a way. Or Jungian. But writing toward essence. Toward a sense of things that signify. What a strange, wonderful mind.