A Hot January

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 30. AUG. 1999

"This is about what got left behind./ A family. A landscape--black sand, white water, green stone./ ....Then, more gradually, the loss of other things./ Pride. Sleep. Health. Weight. Hair. Bone. Time. Heart. Voice." Prolific poet and prose writer Morgan's sixth collection remains fixated on that knottiest of second-wave feminist conundrums--how one's personal tragedies and the much larger-scale conflicts of the world can share space in a single consciousness. That question produces some torturous shifts, as in the title poem: "How tedious this mourning over a lover is, how trite! Better/ to dwell on my country's shift to the Right, better to fight/ for houseless heads, better to heal the body, attempt full-peal/ to write." Elsewhere the poet reads from an encyclopedia, only to teases herself narcissistically with ideas of suicide. Again and again, a reader will look for some redeeming irony--only to find pathetic fallacy ("candytuft nodding in coy denial of problems you/ would not discuss") or jokes that don't quite come off: "Bucolic landscapes had all but put me six feet/ deep down under..." In poems very short and moderately long, couplets and sizable stanzas, lines end-rhymed and internally rhymed, one finds evidence of serious craft ("Glorious leader, bemedaled and embalmed,/ you lie at last a relic, marble-biered in state"), near obsessional soundplay and the attempt to fit empathic straight-talk into some pretty ornate structures. For some readers, dexterous discussion of oppression, illness, survival and heartbreak will be enough. But too often, Morgan's reflections cross the line from artifice and honesty to glibness and self-satisfaction.