The Mind-Body Problem

May 18, 2009
Pollitt now enjoys national fame for her political columns and her personal essays; she gained attention earlier, though, as a poet—Antarctic Traveller
(1982) won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Twenty-seven years later, this second collection shows her fine ear and eye, urbane tones, attention to the ups and downs of middle age and motherhood, and her debts to Elizabeth Bishop, whose most ardent fans will find Pollitt at her worst derivative, but at her best a wise and worthy heir. “Shore Road” just rewrites Bishop’s “Filling Station” (”somebody/ crew-cuts the crab-grass... puts out the plastic lawn chairs”). Poems about biblical scenes and characters seem thin compared to Bishop’s prodigal son. Yet when Pollitt uses Bishop’s careful and careworn tones for autobiography, she achieves wry, urbane retrospect and a power all her own: “Old Sonnets,” for example, recalls Pollitt’s undergraduate poetic ambitions; “Always Already” considers how the adult writer loses herself in the forest of other works, where “culture is a kind of nature,/ a library of oak leaves,/ muttering their foregone oracles.” No one is likely to call Pollitt’s verse radically new. Yet these poems can rise far above their promptings, as fleeting verse about an urban scene can rise to representative powers: often enough, Pollitt does.

June 1, 2009
The bottom line in "Nation" essayist Pollitt's second poetry collection after her National Book Critics Circle Award-winning debut, "Atlantic Traveler" (1983), concerns the existence of God. Looking at neighbors, she wonders whether "this is all there is, / all history's brought us here to our only life." Or, to paraphrase the title poem, while the body wishes to live simply, the mind's lofty spiritual notions get in the way. Even a poem about cats weighs in on "the probable odds of the soul's immortality." Mostly written in free verse, these poems are metaphysical but accessible, with meaning enhanced by figurative language, not lost in it. Their jewel-sharp imagery and tone of melancholic irony are somewhat reminiscent of work by Marianne Moore. VERDICT Unlike much contemporary poetry, these understated poems say only what needs to be said. Although Pollitt writes of objects grounded in daily life, her work here seeks and generally finds transcendence; fans of Pollitt's nonfiction and poetry will heartily welcome this.Diane Scharper, Towson Univ., MD

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2009
Both essays and poems arearresting distillations of thoughts and feelings. So it makes sense that Pollitt, best known as anessayistin the Nation and collected at her acute best in Learning to Drive and Other Life Stories (2007), is also a fine poet. What is surprising is that it has taken her 27 years to publish her second poetry collection, followingthe National Book Critics Circle Awardwinning Antarctic Traveller, but it is well worth the wait. These are pithy, funny, wistful, and womanly wise poemsso ingeniously meteredone feels like applauding after each closing line. And beyond the pleasure of form and tone, theres Pollitts marvelously philosophical and imaginative perceptions. She writestenderly and ruthlessly about the ironies of aging, the poignancy of collectibles, the unexpected beauty of city streets, ourinability to live life as if living were enough, and the perpetual fan dance of illusion and truth. As Pollitt pondersthe Bible andJane Austen, describes a standing heron as a question mark, and remembers the dead, she is at once irreverent and compassionate.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)