Bonds

Jan Seale

Bonds is one of those books I'm never quite sure how to approach. It's certainly got its good points, and just as certainly its bad ones. And yet, there is no feeling of inconsistency in the poems themselves; it's obvious both the good and the bad stem from the same source. Sometimes it just makes you want to shake a writer and say “you're almost there. Just fix these things…”

Seale, who's since been published in most of America's best literary magazines and been an NEA fellowship recipient, seems to have managed to fix them. But in Bonds, which is (as far as I can tell) her first book, they are still evident. And one can find the good and the bad in the same poem all too often, for example:

“Yes, Virginia, obscurity recorded:
the lives of women metered out
in a dailiness monumentally unspoken…”
(“Song for Obscure Women”)

…which practically falls all over itself to tell instead of show, juxtaposed with:

“She asks for a drink.
Her hair crescendos on the pillow.
I fill the syringe and
her tiny embouchure closes on the plastic tip
(no silver tone hole today).”

There is much here to like, but prepare to wade through.