Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form

January 3, 2000
The fussy title of Harvey's distinctive, substantial debut gives a pretty good idea of the Victorian-style cathexes within, swooning with "Objective Fatigue" and clutching "More Sketches for a Beautiful Hat." Many poems issue from a space of Wonderland-like decadence, where "tiny tin gutters would be gauche,/ pathetically mimetic" and "irritated he would play with his/ Chameleon putting her on a paisley pillow or tartan/ Scarf." There is a foreboding to such scenes, and a toughness to Harvey's speakers: one "can't be coy after all I've done" and another has "killed one pride only to have another replace it." Pervasive longings are often compressed into a verbal device Harvey may have imported from Turkish poetry, in which the start of a line (here always unpunctuated) is at once the end of one sentence and the start of the next: "this village is closer to the glacier than/ The volcano emits a tiny rumble & drools lava every few/ Years go by..." It's used too often, but the people and pursuits within the poems as a whole certainly vary: a male poet proceeds from the "Vestibulum" to the "Frigidarium" to find his muse within domestic "Thermae"; "Frederick Courtney Selous" exhorts a lover to make a necklace of the stamps from his letters; one poor lover of the title poem casts a bathtub for his beloved only to burn his feet--all with the craft and care of miniature portraiture. While the results, despite watchful self-inoculation, can be precious, the imagination and syntactic dexterity they display are remarkable.

February 1, 2001
Flecked with color and taking lively twists and turns, this first collection displays a rather remarkable breadth. All of the poems are well wrought, displaying verbal acuity and an over-arching structure that lands the reader in the most unexpected places. Such is the case in "Letting Go," which depicts the desire to hold onto the bell pull and to "go clanging up into the sky." The title poem stands out for its humor and the philosophical distinction between the vessel and its contents: "Whenever we want we can pull the plug and get out/ Which is not the case with our own tighter confinement/ Inside the body oh pity the bathtub but pity us too." Highly recommended.--Ann K. van Buren, Riverdale Country Sch., New York

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