Fat Art Thin Art - C

This is the first book of poems by Sedgwick (Tendencies), the author of several scholarly volumes important to the comparatively new and hot theoretical discourse that calls itself ``queer theory.'' Unfortunately, the theorist as poet proves intellectually challenging yet poetically predictable. Interestingly, the book seems to acknowledge an uncertainty about poetic talents, opening with a meditation on a muse ``graceless'' and difficult to sustain, and concluding with prose which nearly admits the book's longest narrative poem to be a failure. One feels that such humility is not a pose, that it is honest. And yet, the poetry itself seeks clarity and grace; it does not question the ``poetic'' as have some experimentalists. At her best in middle-length poems such as ``Everything Always Distracts,'' Sedgwick can at times approach the wit, intellect and discursive syntactical energy of Randall Jarrell or James Merrill. But her greatest strength is her subject matter, which often reflects the concerns of a contemporary academic culture: the struggle to reimagine gender roles, sexuality, transgressive sexual fantasy and behavior, and realities of disease and depression. If one can look past the awkwardness of her abstract diction and a dependence on loose, sluggish iambs and unimaginative prose rhythms, there is an extraordinary mind to be engaged here. (Sept.)