Wonders
Karen Snow
This collection of 14 long, harrowing, extremely skillful poems, winner of the 1978 Walt Whitman Award for best first book, jells chiefly because the persona in each poem is constant: Wilhelmina Von Musson, also called Willo and, by her mother, Whitey–on account of Willo’s brains and blondeness and fineness, all things that the coarse mother doesn’t have and thus degrades. Father is a meek, religious railroad worker only too happy to withdraw into the Bible and away from his wife’s brute ignorance, bigotry, and hurtfulness. Willo, her sister Dora, Father, Mother, Mother’s cretinous brothers–they are vivid and novelistic; and the fact that their stories are told scattered down the page adds extra drama all its own. Yet there’s an element also of brittle trick to it, as there often is in lurid autobiographical verse: the force is all in the clever reportage, but there’s little resonance to savor. ”He gave her a whooping/cross-eyed daughter”–did her first husband to Willo–”and while he was hustling/ the madonna and child into Kodachrome,/ he added a thin, allergic son./ He grew thicker./ She, thinner./ The babies bawled.” The explosive craft of Snow’s bitter work is shown to better effect in the title poem, a Whitmanesque catalogue of personal premonitions, a discomforting, odd, and alluring poem. Snow is undoubtedly a poet of talent and dark reaches, but here there’s much that only sears and doesn’t go on smoking. ~ Kirkus Review
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Details
| ISBN | 9780670779178 |
| Genre | Award Winner; Grier Rated; Poetry |
| Publication Date | 1980 |
| Publisher | Viking Press |
| Format | Paperback |
| Language | English |
| Rating | Great |
| BookID | 14927 |
