Bunny

Selima Hill

Selima Hill's Bunny is a book that at first seemed custom-tailored for me: short poems (most running under ten lines) that stick close to the image, rather than wandering off into vagueness. Or so I thought. The vague does rear its ugly head here now and again, though not so much that it drags most poems down. Taken one at a time, there's a lot to like here. When collected into book form, however, one begins to realize that obsession, while a useful tool in the hands of many excellent poets, can be taken just a step too far. This is the second book of poetry I've come across (Debra Weinstein's Rodent Angel being the first) where whole chunks of verbiage from one poem are lifted verbatim into another. I don't suggest the poet is cannibalizing her own work here, by any means; I think it comes from having that particular phrase, sentence, whatever, being so insistent in the brain that it's forced out more than once. Which is all well and good, when you're publishing one of them and not the other in a magazine. When both show up in a book, though, it comes off sounding like a grating refrain in a popular song, or as if the book should have been one book-length poem rather than fifty or sixty shorter pieces. Either way, it grates somewhat.

That said, don't let it stop you from picking this up, as what's here is often stark, haunting. Just be prepared to take this book, despite its slimness, at the most leisurely of paces, so when you come to each poem, you're coming to it fresh.