« quick tech question | Main | sailing to instancia »

10.25.4

trouble in mind

Scattered thoughts on Lucie Brock-Broido's new collection Trouble in Mind because (what else do I ever complain about) I'm tired:

Fantastic of course, but what else was I expecting. More precise, dark, explicitly dramatic, relentlessly tragic, than the earlier books. Thus harder for me to be patient with (a little tired of romanticizations of mental illness) yet some of them are very insightful. My current favorite is "The One Thousand Days" - I interpreted the following passage as trying to describe how high self-expectations can cause depression, and how even if you recognize that bad habit and try to take a more Buddhist stance, you can find yourself mired in depression nonetheless -

Then was ambition come

Gleaming up like a fractured bone as it breaks

Through the bodiced veil of skin.

I marry into it, a thistle on the palm, salt-pelt on

The slaughtering, and trouble came.

That the name of bliss is only in the diminishing

(As far as possible) of pain. That I had quit

The quiet velvet cult of it,
                                    Yet trouble came.

.I read some of the poems, like "Dire Wolf" and "Pamphlet on Wooing" so long ago that they've taken on too familiar an air, and make the whole book read like an oldies collection.

Its archaicisms goes well with Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.

No ampersands in the book's first fifth: a typesetting error?

Disappointed with "Self-Portrait as Kaspar Hauser": "I was a wonderment" as much of a copout as "what was wood became alive." It's possible this is one historical figure about whom it's just impossible to write a good poem.

Comments