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jmarkwindy's review
2.0
The speaker in Orchidelirium (yes, I'm going out on a limb here and assuming most, if not all, of these poems are spoken by the same entity) seems to be at a crossroads in life. Death of the mother, caretaking, unfulfillment in romantic love, chronic dissatisfaction, existential crisis, sexual desire, the taboo—all of these subjects make appearances in this collection and ultimately join forces to achieve an interesting reading experience.
Although so much of this book's language deals in the immediately accessible and familiar, I think it operates at its best when it examines the unknown. Examples include two poems embodying deep loss in the wake of 9/11, "Air Travel" and "Manhattan Fragments," which are my favorites in the collection. However, the supreme unknown is also explored in lines from the poem "Winter on Hudson Street" which appears early on and is a standout, in my opinion, for its ability to address complex ideas via simple presentation:
These lines depict an obvious disassociation with a divine most commonly gendered as male, but the speaker goes a step further to assign "it" to the all-powerful, a pronoun least assigned to humans (a telling choice, considering we were supposedly made in "his" image). And yet this idea is juxtaposed with the personification of the divine: it sits at the table and hangs its head. To me, these lines are really asking: Who or what are we praying to exactly? Landau offers a complicated answer to this question a bit later in the same poem when she completes a prayer scene with:
I mean... that's just plain great.
Nevertheless, the collection takes a dip for me whenever the speaker is reminded of an unrequited or waning love upon noticing commonplace objects, and this happens a little too often. It's not so much that I mind this element is present (after all, who hasn't experienced this?), but I'm not totally convinced by the tone of its argument. For example, in "Billboards and Other Signs of Loss" the speaker is distracted by a Calvin Klein underwear model on an ad while stuck in traffic in West Hollywood. I want to find this situation funny, but the following lines seem out of place, overblown, and way too solemn by contrast:
If I could use a part to demonstrate the whole, I think these lines from the poem "Traffic in West Hollywood" sum up the trouble I have with Orchidelirium:
The speaker may be sick of the familiar and crave the strange, but the poems in this collection aren't nearly strange enough to legitimize this confession. Not in tone, lineation, word choice, subject matter, texture, form, and so on. But it also occurs to me that the familiar language readers encounter here could be a synthesis of the speaker's surroundings. If this is the case, the speaker may crave a new life while expressing how they feel using the only language they have access to, language inspired by what they see in their current environment and the company they keep.
As this is Landau's debut collection, I look forward to seeing the intricate dance between the familiar and the strange play out in her more recent work, namely The Uses of the Body and Soft Targets.
Although so much of this book's language deals in the immediately accessible and familiar, I think it operates at its best when it examines the unknown. Examples include two poems embodying deep loss in the wake of 9/11, "Air Travel" and "Manhattan Fragments," which are my favorites in the collection. However, the supreme unknown is also explored in lines from the poem "Winter on Hudson Street" which appears early on and is a standout, in my opinion, for its ability to address complex ideas via simple presentation:
God sits at our table
and hangs its head.
These lines depict an obvious disassociation with a divine most commonly gendered as male, but the speaker goes a step further to assign "it" to the all-powerful, a pronoun least assigned to humans (a telling choice, considering we were supposedly made in "his" image). And yet this idea is juxtaposed with the personification of the divine: it sits at the table and hangs its head. To me, these lines are really asking: Who or what are we praying to exactly? Landau offers a complicated answer to this question a bit later in the same poem when she completes a prayer scene with:
There's a prayer to chant,
but I don't know it.
Don't worry, my father says,
if anyone were listening,
we wouldn't need the candle.
I mean... that's just plain great.
Nevertheless, the collection takes a dip for me whenever the speaker is reminded of an unrequited or waning love upon noticing commonplace objects, and this happens a little too often. It's not so much that I mind this element is present (after all, who hasn't experienced this?), but I'm not totally convinced by the tone of its argument. For example, in "Billboards and Other Signs of Loss" the speaker is distracted by a Calvin Klein underwear model on an ad while stuck in traffic in West Hollywood. I want to find this situation funny, but the following lines seem out of place, overblown, and way too solemn by contrast:
I thought I knew what purpose was, what it would be to live
as though nothing were missing and nothing hurt.
If I could use a part to demonstrate the whole, I think these lines from the poem "Traffic in West Hollywood" sum up the trouble I have with Orchidelirium:
Sick of the familiar clutch and slide,
the inherited, parental, marriage bed,
I crave what's strange
The speaker may be sick of the familiar and crave the strange, but the poems in this collection aren't nearly strange enough to legitimize this confession. Not in tone, lineation, word choice, subject matter, texture, form, and so on. But it also occurs to me that the familiar language readers encounter here could be a synthesis of the speaker's surroundings. If this is the case, the speaker may crave a new life while expressing how they feel using the only language they have access to, language inspired by what they see in their current environment and the company they keep.
As this is Landau's debut collection, I look forward to seeing the intricate dance between the familiar and the strange play out in her more recent work, namely The Uses of the Body and Soft Targets.
joannanewsom's review
4.0
So different from her later two collections and my least favorite of all of her books, but I really liked it. I JUST LOVE DEBORAH LANDAU OK
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