Louise in Love

December 11, 2000
This is not a book about silent screen star Louise Brooks, despite her photo on the book's cover, seeming references to the notoriously alcoholic Brooks's many lost weekends, and persistent echoes of the 1920s throughout. Bang's (Apology for Want) "dramatis personae" in these serial poems include, among many others, Louise; her sister, Louise; her lover, Ham; and Ham's brother, Charles. Nothing much happens, but sensibilities are conveyed with accurate emotions and a liberally deployed knowledge of the arts. Like many of the louche denizens of Brooks's era, Bang's characters can overdo the alliteration and borrowing of musicality of foreign languages, whether French or Italian: "Louise dreamed a clowder of cats was eating yesterday's dinner.../ December, a drear pentimento--unveiling the mouth...." The sardonic "Here's a Fine Word: Prettiplease" has some of the world-weary tone of Jean Rhys and Dorothy Parker, but the dominant influence here may be John Berryman's Henry, who harkened back in a similarly multi-vocal fashion. And Louise's problems in her love affair with Ham (along with their erotic doubles) point to a wry gay subtext la Djuna Barnes. While some readers will find the clowder of characters and their Edward Gorey-like diction cloying, others will delight in Bang's unsparing ("Diaphragmatic heaving. Base emetic act./ The puky little sun glowing to a glare. Puissance.") time-channeling.

December 20, 2000
Bang's second collection will try many patient readers with its surface of brilliant word play teased by a hint of narrative. The list of characters include Louise, a young woman in love; her sister, Lydia; her lover, Ham Gorden; his brother, Charles Gorden; and a child named Isabella, suggesting a graspable plot. But Louise's love voyage from innocence to experience is decidedly nonlinear. If you can approach this kind of writing with an open mind, you will be enchanted by some of the d cor, including the retro-style courtship of Louise and Ham, the literary allusions (those that you catch, of course), and the brilliant, sonorous juxtapositions: "The wrists tiny veinlets sunk/ while gravity's gooseherd gathered the minion capillaries." Bang can't stop inventing and accumulating these gems; from "a clowder of cats" to "a dart in the eye of Ifdom," brief moments congeal, though not with any clear destination in mind. There are only fragments of sex, ennui, Keats, and Virginia Woolf, in "a fantastic sea where nothing but nothing can save us." By the end, Bang runs the risk of losing her readers, but she seems to be having too good a time to care. For academic collections.--Ellen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine LLP Law Lib., New York

Copyright 2000 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2001
Bang, author of the prize-winning "Apology "for Want (1996), unveils an enrapturing series of poems about a woman named Louise; Ham, the man she's sweet on; her sister, Lydia; Ham's brother; and a child. Amorphous characters, they are figments born of romanticism and figures out of paintings or film, yet Louise, who is more mood and musings than body, is driven into a fugue state by desire. These sly, subtly narrative poems manage to be both languid and epigrammatic, sensual and ironic as Bang conjures a diaphanous yet edgy realm in which Louise and her companions travel by train and motorcar to mansions and mausoleums, lakes and rivers, beaches and mountains, perhaps for real, perhaps in their dreams. Bang pays tribute to Keats and Woolf in scenes of emotional and physical opulence that are underpinned by reflections on death, just as flesh covers bone. Her language is musical; her consonance consummate; and the depth and complexity of her thoughts take on different configurations with each rereading of these playful yet serious, coy yet passionate poems. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2001, American Library Association.)