Tripping

I want to flat-out like Vivian Shipley's latest book, All of Your Messages Have Been Erased—there's so much that's excellent here. Shipley's metaphors are often surprising and apt, her language fresh, and her subject matter interesting. Even her titles and first lines inspire one to sit up straight and pay attention, appetite whetted. Take, for instance, "Ode to Virginia Tech, Blackburg: April 16, 2007":

The Monday after Thanksgiving was a    school holidaythat unleashed us to hunt with our fathers for    the first day

of deer season and soak plaid shirts with    entrails of a buck.In Lejunior, Kentucky, after mopping off    coal dust, we ate

at kitchen tables stained with blood from    squirrel meatchopped up for burgoo.

Here the poet is telling us something new, and telling well: the language is tight, but not compacted or strained.

Told from the point of view of a well-known Alcatraz prisoner and autobiographer, "This Sleepover is Voluntary" launches us into this unusual scene:

First time for everything: a birthday cake    outlinedwith sixty-three candles to celebrate the    openingof Alcatraz in 1934. Balloons, hand colored,    frame

my nametag: Jim Quillen, 77, retired bank    robber,kidnapper, burglar, prison escapee.

The voices Shipley chooses are out of the ordinary, and beckon us with promises of unusual journeys.

However, one doesn't have to be a grammar maven to be stopped by Shipley's grammatical problems, such as a plethora of dangling modifiers. Like potholes, they jar unexpectedly and the reader pulls to the side of the road, wondering things like, "Wait, I thought the narrator killed the baby?" "Refusing to kill what / love created, I had to do what you should have done." The sentence structure indicates that the "I," which follows the opening modifier "refusing to kill," didn't kill. However, if one searches the poem to re-affirm this reading, one will find proof that the male narrator, speaking to the condemned mother, is the killer: "Using gloves, I was careful, didn't leave marks on our son's / neck to condemn you." It's no fun to take time out like this to fact-check and mentally correct a poem.

Other instances of the dangling modifiers are simply annoying. Here are two of five from "The First Poem I Have Labeled: Love Poem": "A precise / man with words, but no Williams Safire, to please you, I learned / dusk is the dim part of twilight that marks the beginning of night," and "A boy in Missouri, / milk delivered to the doorstep was in glass bottles capped with / waxed paper."

A poem I liked, that I wanted to use to balance out my review, I discovered had lifted phrase

Detail from cover

after phrase from a book review in The New Yorker. Perhaps such lifting is a kind of "poetic quilting" (the poem's title takes its name, in part, from the book review), but here, especially because of tiny synonym exchanges, the poem feels more like a slightly dishonest Freshman English paper. See for yourself Shipley's "A fire in her brain: Lucia Joyce in An Institution in Ivry—1907-1982" and Joan Acocella's book review of a Lucia Joyce biography (The New Yorker, December 8, 2003).

I believe that readers are more than eager to follow poets, to enjoy the trip that is a poem. But we need to go along with a voice we feel is steady—at least on certain levels. There is much that is fresh and beautiful in Shipley's work: I just wish I trusted the poems more.