Ophelia

Natasha Trethewey

A very slim volume, this, running under forty pages; it's more of a chapbook than a book, or would be had not Graywolf poured a professional amount of money into its publication. Whether the work deserved it or not is, of course, subject to argument (as it is with all books of poetry); but I get the feeling that even the most hardcore reader and collector of poetry is going to have a hard time shelling out the average price of a book of poetry-- already far greater, in terms of pennies per page, than it is for a novel or a piece of nonfiction-- for a book about half the size of an average single-author collection.

The poems themselves are interesting, and make for quite good reading overall. Trethewey, inspired by E. J. Bellocq's photographs of a Louisiana prostitute, imagines herself from the girl's perspective, first in a series of letters to an old friend at home, then in the girl's diary. If Trethewey's mission here was to show that Ophelia was an individual, a human being, rather than just a prostitute or just a photographic subject, she succeeded nicely; phelia's voice is a strong one, and will stay with the reader after the book is finished. I just wish there had been more of that voice.