Reviews for Familiar things

The average rating for Familiar things based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-05-10 00:00:00 Stephen Moroney On a sonic level, these poems are prosodically beautiful, caressing your ears like the sound of rustling leaves or flowing water. The line breaks are authoritatively placed in a way that respects the taut-muscled autonomy of each individual line, and the sentences are syntactically complex in a way that does not starve or insult the reader's intelligence. These are poems that really *sound* like poetry. Through Google, I learned that the first half of the book concerns the death of the poet's father, while the second half revolves around the poet's experiences teaching political prisoners. Maybe I'm just stupid, but I don't think I would ever have been able to figure this out from the poems themselves; these poems are, by and large, opaque in a way that can be quite frustrating. It's almost as though they were written in a code that was only intended to be fully understood by the poet herself and a select group of her intimates. Frankly, I'm not sure this is a good thing. Furthermore, McGuckian has an Ashberian tendency to seem to get carried away by the complexity of her own metaphors, as in the following example: "I feel warmth coming from you/as clouds working up the sky/seen through warm clouds/that are cold at the base." A metaphor like that seems overly convoluted to me, without much payoff in the way of increased comprehension. This may just be a matter of personal preference, but I crave more epiphanies, more rapturous thunderclaps of insight that speak lucidly to my intellect as well as to my ear. I want to read poems that will make wiser, that will teach me general truths about love or death or humanity, and it can be difficult to extract such general truths from poems as stubbornly cryptic and psychologically idiosyncratic as these. But I like the rare moments in which McGuckian's poems get self-referential, fragmentedly elucidating the nature of her own personal aesthetic: beautifully, she speaks of longing for a book that "makes a plaster cast of the moon," a book that "rubs out of the frail moon a strong one." Coyly, she asserts that what "a poetess" does is "speak...with [her audience's] consciousness/and not with words." And, indeed, for better or worse, a re-interpretation of the relationship between words and meaning seems to be at the heart of McGuckian's poetry.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-09-18 00:00:00 Mark Shade This book is wonderful and full of prosody, painterly images, a solid sensical line. It's not necessarily my thing, but she does what she's doing incredibly well and with tenderness.