After 20 years off the publishing grid, Zweig's Vinegar Bone
(1999) put her very much back on-line: its densely wrought but attractively homespun poems seemed to emanate at once from knots and tangles at the core of New England English, and from her particular corner of rural Vermont. The first half of this memorable followup returns to those strengths, and even extends them a bit. The rainy landscape in "Revisitor" displays "a stray mind in multiples of/ nuance" whose gritty diction responds to a rural girlhood; poems like "Per Stripes" and "Home Remedy" highlight Zweig's off-kilter voice, while her personae range from New England widows to Red Riding Hood to Rumpelstiltskin. "I'm the another/ one thing leads to, the neither/ entirely unexpected, nor not." Readers who find the volume's first poems too opaque or too much like one another will find fresh delights in a series of poems about animals, from "Cow Dream with Commentary" to "Ducks" ("preamble,/ backtalk & sass") through cats, horses, snakes and even a "Scarecrow," who states: "I hang on yr knots & nag birds." A final, darker and perhaps deeper set of poems finds the poet at home alone, considering the beginning and end of life: "As for my days on this/ stern earth I deny them all." At once invitingly folksy and demanding in their slippery symbols and syntax, Zweig's work ought to win several audiences at once: her "tipsy candlepower" and "box... of/ what-have-you" both charm at first reading, and reward later care. (June)
Forecast:
Vinegar Bone won Zweig a coveted Whiting, and this collection may contend for more awards; as with Ruth Stone and Marie Ponsot, Zweig's status as an emerging older poet might also generate news and magazine coverage, especially in New England and New York.
