Book Reviews/Articles/Interviews
The Workshop Discontent
Facts About the Moon
The Red Hisbiscus
Beauty and Brutality: Facts About the Moon
Poet's Choice
By Robert Pinsky - Sunday, May 13, 2007; BW1
Poetry appeals to people who get bored easily. It can accomplish a lot in small spaces: sometimes, in almost no time at all. Often, it works by moving rapidly, skipping over predictable or needless steps, disregarding or exploding the obvious. Sometimes, it feints in one direction, then takes another. Or, the poem quickly upends our first, easy associations, as when William Blake uses the nouns "rose" and "love":
THE SICK ROSE
O rose, thou art sick;
The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
Blake reverses conventional expectation from his title onward, with a violent and exuberant forward thrust. A poem in Dorianne Laux's recent collection Facts About the Moon also has the quality of speed, incorporating reversal into a more zigzag movement:
LITTLE MAGNOLIA
Not nearly a woman like the backyard cedar
whose branches fall and curl,
whose curved body sways in wind,
the little magnolia is still a girl,
her first blossoms tied like white strips of rag
to the tips of her twiggy pigtails.
Who are the trees? They live
half in air, half below ground,
both rooted and homeless, like the man
who wedges his life between
the windbreak wall of the Laundromat
and the broken fence, a strip of gritty earth
where he's unfolded his section
of clean cardboard, his Goodwill blanket.
Here's his cup, his candle, his knife.
The title is like a magician's gesture of misdirection. The metaphors of the first sentence get displaced or amended by the central question, and even the simile that compares "rooted and homeless" trees to the "rooted and homeless" man is not a resting place or resolution. It depends on the more enigmatic, unresolved question: In what way does the homeless man, or anyone, live "half in air, half below ground"? The poem touches on the way any perception, any thought, perhaps any life, exists in two elements, half-submerged and half-exposed. As the three nouns of Laux's final line suggest, human life, like poetry, requires -- along with a container for sustenance and a source of light -- a sharp instrument.
(William Blake's poem "The Sick Rose" can be found in collections of his poetry. Dorianne Laux's poem "Little Magnolia" is from her book "Facts about the Moon." Norton. Copyright 2005 by Dorianne Laux.)
-Robert Pinsky was poet laureate of the United States from 1997 through 2000.
“Facts About the Moon is a splendid book of enchanting poems that make one feel the ‘lunar strength and brutal pull’ of love that exists in spite of our human frailty. In those frailties lie our strengths. Dorianne Laux knows this and her poems show it.” -Ai
"Dorianne Laux has created an ever-expanding body of work in which the examined life is the common one, recognizable and shared, yet also transformed-each statement, feeling, fact set down with accuracy, original vision, and an unerring musicality and alertness. Facts about the Moon continually surprises and enriches. In its rhetorical clarity, emotional honesty, lyric beauty, attention to detail, and moral encounter with the world, this volume is a rewarding and powerful achievement." -Jane Hirshfield
"These poems represent a knowledge, and a sensibility, that is unmistakable, and a lyric loveliness that springs from that knowledge. I loved reading them and I praise them to the sky." -Gerald Stern
The Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring 2006
Facts about the Moon, by Dorianne Laux -
Norton, November 2005, 23.95
Laux’s fourth collection of poems gives us more of what we have come to love and crave from this poet: startlingly distinctive vocabulary, sensual engagement with the body, and beautiful articulation of the ranges of human life coupled with a commitment to the details of particular human lives.
Some samples of the distinctive language of this book are her description of the northern lights as “those alien green curtains,” the color of ravens’ wings is “silt-shine,” a crossing of elk across a highway as “slow as a Greek frieze,’ an old waitress’s arches fallen “like grand cathedrals,” and the development of a fetus as a “sideshow trick.” “Face Poem,” though, gives new meaning to even Laux’s specific brand of distinctive language. This poem is a rollicking accumulation of descriptions: “your craggy mountain goat face./ Your mole-ridden, whiskered, stumpy fish of a face…/ jaw like a hinge, washboard forehead…/ Your used car lot of a face, the bumpers/ and sprung hoods and headlights of your eyes, your DieHard/ battery of a face… five knuckled slug/ of a face.” It takes readers through a gamut of images that have the effect of not only creating the intimacy the you and I of the poem share, but also the intimacy the poet shares with everything she encounters.
In Facts about the Moon, Laux insists that there is a persistence in life that is not limited to the desire of humans for persistence (of love, of distinctive towns, of nature), but also includes persistence of life that is separate, and often unconcerned, with humanity. Her attention to detail comes across less as a mater of craft than a matter of being in the world, of encountering everything with an eye toward intimacy with the encountered world.
-Lilah Hegnauer
Publisher’s Weekly
Facts About the Moon, Dorianne Laux. Norton, $23.95 (96p) ISBN 0-393-06096-9
Laux's fluent and likable first person shoots straight on sex, relationships and American adulthood in this substantial and unusually various fourth collection. The Oregon poet opens with a funny, compassionate political poem about urban mass transit, segues to "Vacation Sex" ("We've been at it all summer") and then to a meditation on the flag of Alaska, designed (as Laux explains) by a 13-year-old orphan 78 years ago. If she casts a wide net for subjects, Laux (Smoke) shows equal breadth with her free verse forms; the most accomplished tend to use long lines, and to digress, tersely and thoughtfully, from their narrative threads. Describing her marriage, her Western travels and her erotic history as girl and woman, Laux works in the idiom of Philip Levine and Sharon Olds, yet Laux's best verse is perhaps more surprising than theirs: if she occasionally sounds lugubrious, more often she makes "new cells pungent with the old codes." Laux has not invented a new style, but she has improved the one she has: "It took me years to grow a heart," Laux quips, "from paper and glue"; her verse certainly draws on it. (Nov.)
“Speaking with authority from the first page, this collection is accessible, familiar, the poet’s trenchant observations sitting like pearls upon the tongue. . . . These poems bear the ring of truth, a view of the world from the street, the earth, nature’s embrace, beneath the eye of the watching moon. . . . This is a poet who isn’t afraid to get her hands dirty or her heart broken.” —Curled Up With A Good Book
POETRY COLLECTION OFFERS SIMPLE LANGUAGE
By Ada Molinoff, Section Word - Posted on Sun Sep 30, 2007 at 02:17:04 AM PDT
The poetry in "Facts About the Moon" is the stuff you wish you'd read in high school English class. Everyday language describes relevant content that covers the gamut of familial and physical love, childhood sexual abuse, loss and nature. All the pieces in this fourth collection of Dorianne Laux's poetry reflect her life experience. In a recent conversation she said, "It's all autobiographical."
Dorianne Laux is an associate professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Oregon. She also is a faculty member in Pacific University's MFA in Writing program. "Facts About the Moon" was the winner of the 2006 Oregon Book Award. The title poem, "Facts about the Moon," begins humorously: "The moon is backing away from us / an inch and a half each year... What's a person supposed to do?" The poem takes a serious turn to present misplaced loyalty, that of a mother to her murderer son. The theme of love is the focus in final lines that engage us because of their universality: "...you want / to slap her back to sanity... and you almost do / until she lifts her pale puffy face, her eyes / two craters, and then you can't help it / either, you know love when you see it, / you can feel its lunar strength, its brutal pull."
In "My Brother's Grave," Laux conveys emotion indirectly, through vivid imagery -- in her "pulling up / weeds from the roadside,... / tough, stringy stems / I had to chew off with my teeth, / the pitiful blossoms sodden, barely there" -- and directly, in the final lines: "How could I have imagined then / how alone I would become."
The lyrical "Morning Song" evokes physical sensations as well as emotions. The narrator takes her "first swallow" of coffee, tastes "... the sharp, nearly painful heat / ...the liquid / unraveling down the raw tunnel of my throat." She experiences her body "fully, vessel of desire, / my stomach a pond of want and warmth...." She hears each bird's song, "...and I know I am here, / in this widening light, as we all are, with them, / even the most damaged among us or lonely / or nearly dead, and ...for each of us there is / some small sound like an unseen bird... / that could wake us, and take us home."
"Tonight I Am in Love" demonstrates Laux's love of the rhythms and sounds of words. A tribute to all great poets, the piece ends in these affecting lines: "When I cannot see to read or walk alone / along the slough, I will hear you, I will/ bring the longing in your voices to rest / against my old, tired heart and call you back."
