Reviews for Oblique Prayers: New Poems with Fourteen Translations from Jean Joubert

The average rating for Oblique Prayers: New Poems with Fourteen Translations from Jean Joubert based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-03-22 00:00:00 Keith Simpson I had seen an Amy Gerstler poem I liked, and so I randomly selected this 1997 volume from the library shelves. Gerstler's strength is her plain language, combined with highly unusual images and perspectives. Many of the poems in this collection were bleak and hard for me to penetrate, yet each had its value of arresting ideas and descriptions. When Gerstler chose to write more directly and personally, she produced her best poems, I think. One about her newborn nephew, and two about a brother who struggled with a brain tumor, were particularly touching and effective. Her is one of those poems. Miasma You claim there's a road through this nightmare terrain. over crevice and fissure, hill and dale of that planet afloat in the cup of your skull -- your thoughts' native soil, a gray world thickly crisscrossed by little rivers, shrouded in cloud. You survived the peeling back of your brain's protective membranes, one dubbed dura mater, "hard mother," by early surgeons because it's so hard to cut through; another called arachnoid for its white likeness to spiderweb. You joked drunkenly while waking from an operation where virtuoso neurosurgeons sliced your brain like a rich birthday cake. It's gross understatement to say your path's strewn with obstacles: the migration of proper names, the debris of seizures, Demerol's flapping circus tent dizzily printed with wild red spirals, your family's abject panic -- all this enclosed by a survival curve's high electrified fence. Smiling, you comfort your loved ones, fear lodged in their throats like fish bones. I cannot say how much I admire you, who purified himself at a moment's notice, though I contend you were squeaky clean at the start. Every day you pass through this mapless landscape unharmed. a fruit falling to earth, so sure of its ripeness. Your convinction's made a believer of me, your grim, bewildered sister, who ought to turn in the pile of books she's cowered behind all her life and get in line to become your disciple. Yes, I agree, this miasma will evaporate, just as you say. It will lift like mist from the fine blameless mind in which it began, erased by a radiance whose source is not glowing isotopes, but your right and left hemispheres, those fertile interlocking continents, homelands of your soul. When she is most accessible, Gerstler's powerful language and images aslant give her poems their strongest impact.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-03-05 00:00:00 Godiswhite White -Recipe for Trouble -A Measured Joy -Montage of Disasters -Mixed Messages -A Fan Letter not a lot I liked in this collection but still a Gerstler helluva read. Here is my overall favorite. "Song" is a must read for fans of bizarre absurdity.