cover image Dailies and Rushes: Poems

Dailies and Rushes: Poems

Susan Kinsolving. Grove Press, $13 (96pp) ISBN 978-0-8021-3605-3

Like prints rushed to the screening room, the poems of Kinsolving's debut hit simultaneous notes of specificity and vagueness, as if the rest of the story remains to be shot. In a familiar, no longer New York School blend of the quotidian and the quixotic, she takes on international politics, the violent death of a relative and the classic urgency of losing and finding love; and yet it is the occasional searing private moment, and not the thematic scope, that makes many of these poems shine. The best, like ""The Jellyfish"" or ""The Night Nurse,"" strike to the heart of an ironic or Plath-like conundrum: ""`These are your numbers,' she soothes. `You must/ not refuse. The hospital provides them free/ of charge and we can insert them without leaving/ scars.'"" Often it is the half-buried pun that satisfies here rather than her more overt word-play, and similarly, the poems frequently end with a ponderous last line that sometimes works, and sometimes comes off belabored: ""I hear/ the closing door as it has never closed before."" Kinsolving's tone can indeed be lofty, speaking of death as ""the great weight of being,"" and the frequent repetitions are often ineffective, coming off more as unwieldly struggles than as artifice. But in her impressively stylized constructions and ""more than meets the eye"" depths (well explored in Richard Howard's rapt introduction) there remains a mutable, complex imagery (""The sick float past their bloodsteams into an evening of smooth lakes"") giving even the more uneven pieces an ambivalent appeal. (Mar.)