Life Among the Trolls (review)

both of which overshadow the function of paradox, the real source of poetry's transcendent beauty. For Simic, poetry boils down to two themes: "How strange I should be alive in this very moment. How strange the knowledge that I shall die one day." Such wonderment in the face of the sublime has long been a staple of his poetry yet, as he reveals in these essays, his mysticism is unalloyed by metaphysical speculation, which he deems to be an obstacle to the experience of mystery and awe. (KH) Life Among the Trolls by Maura Stanton Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1998, 86 pp., $11.95 Maura Stanton's fourth book of poems is a beautiful and uneasy examination of what it means tobe a human and a writer. The poems persistently return to realizations of the grotesque underpinnings of art and life. The title poem chronicles the speaker's mutation into one of the trolls that "try to look like humans/ In their wigs and smiling masks/ Hiding their bristly humps,/Their bulbous eyes and horns." The speaker remembers, "Once sponge/ Slipped off a hand I was shaking/ And I felt the hooked claw/Quivering , exposed." The best poems in this collection enact similar transformations , the hand turned to claw, the familiar changed into the foreign. The images that evoke revelations of how monstrous it is to be alive and writing are often grim or violent: a fall in a parking lot that reveals a blood clot, a poetess who is imprisoned and forced to burn her work, the student with a tumor in her chest. These poems juxtapose tales of how the body can fail with stories of how art might also falter. In "Ornaments," a gradeschool child is horrified by the amateurish Christmas ornament she creates: "I held it up, shocked that my eager hands/ Had turned desire for beauty into nothing." And in "Drugstore Trolls," the uncannily "half-human," garishly outfitted troll dolls, which include an artist troll, are "given lives/So like our lives they seem like mockery." Stanton's poems are plain-spoken narratives, but just when they begin to seem too prosy they take startling leaps, as in "Letters from Paradise," in which, describing an exotic landscape , the poet suddenly divulges that "the insects/That seem like butterflies , drifting, gorgeous,/Are really pieces of thehuman mind." This alternation between ambitious imagery and everyday detail mirrors the tension in the collection between the permanence of art and the unreliability of the body. At times, the poems that are overtly about writing become too heavyhanded , as in "Ballad of the Magic Glasses," where the speaker is doomed to wear glasses that allow her to see the ugly truths of the world around her. But for the most part the verse is sure-footed, successfully risktaking . In this beguiling collection, Stanton maps what appears to be familiar territory while gradually revealing its true strangeness. (TH) Herb's Pajamas by Abigail Thomas Algonquin, 1998, 210 pp., $17.95 The Missouri Review · 217 ...