From Publishers Weekly
This fifth collection's title mostly refers to the body itself as hazardous material; the book includes poems about tattoos, the ever-hazardous penis ("Men are known to appreciate/ What it stands for"), and death by cancer and AIDS-related illnesses. For New Yorkers like McClatchy (Ten Commandments; Twenty Questions), "hazmat" will immediately recall September 11; a three-sonnet set called "Jihad" reacts not so much to one terrorist incident but to the Middle East troubles generally, and to the word "jihad," thereby adding language to the list of what may be toxic: "The holy war/ Is waged against the self at first, to raze/ The ziggurat of sin we climb upon/ To view ourselves, and next against that glaze/ The enemies of faith will use to disguise/ Their words. Only then, and at the caliph's nod,/ Are believers called to drown in blood the people/ Of an earlier book. There is no god but God." A series of 20 short poems ("Motets") brings McClatchy's classicism into a more compressed, more narrative mode, taking up bodies, illness or sex: "shapes on the sheet,/ yours doubled over, mine clenched and released." The longest and last poem, "Ouija," is McClatchy's elegy for James Merrill, using the s‚ance form central to Merrill's own epic to memorialize Merrill's project, to consider the mystery of his oeuvre and to "imagine a wave goodbye." If the book's varying materials aren't quite volatile enough to merit the title, they are still very affecting.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--Ce texte provient d'une édition qui n'est plus publiée ou qui est non diponible.
From Library Journal
In his fifth book of poetry (after The Ten Commandments), McClatchy continues to explore the connection between the spiritual and the corporeal, seeking "a desire as yet half-satisfied." Though he reveres the past and pays tribute to his mentor, James Merrill, the largesse of these poems is the command over craft and language. McClatchy realizes that form and content do matter; what is being said is inherent in how it is being said. For example, in the poem "Glanum," which employs the couplet, the tempo increases with the use of enjambments as if the reader were racing through the ruins. Throughout, McClatchy demonstrates a fine linguistic control. The restricted use of end-stopped lines subdues the tendency of the rhymes to call attention to the pattern, and the slant rhymes (scribes/ pride; legion/become) prevent the poem from becoming monotonous and predictable. Thematically, Hazmat possesses a sense of grief, which "sinks its sorrow deep within and through its own life." In the end, these poems come to represent our own lives, our own longings, our own "flag of surrender" to the spiritual. A brilliant testament to McClatchy's place among American poets; highly recommended.
Tim Gavin, Episcopal Acad., Merion, PACopyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--Ce texte provient d'une édition qui n'est plus publiée ou qui est non diponible.
