Scan barcode
hmidk's review against another edition
3.0
The absolute exuberance in many of these poems is (perhaps due to the time it was written) still totally earnest and (to me?) completely unironic... the tone of these is built around the preeminent puncuated display of exuberance and excitement -- the exclamation mark.
from "Hair"
"Come back, hair, come back!
I want to grow sideburns!
I want to wash you, comb you, sun you, love you!
As I ran from you wild before --
I thought surely this nineteen hundred and fifty nine of now
that I need no longer bite my fingernails
but have handsome gray hair
to show how profoundly nervous I am.
Damned be hair!
Hair that must be plucked from soup! . . . "
Some of Corso's most famous and best poems are here, such as "Marriage" and "Bomb," but what makes this book really work as a collection of poems is the recurring images/ideas that are often very commonplace or simple, the most notable being hair itself, which gets its own titular poem and touchingly reflected on again in "I Held a Shelley Manuscript,"
"Quickly, my eyes moved quickly,
sought for smell for dust for lace
for dry hair!"
Still, some of these don't age so gracefully as others, and I skip many when I read through it, often for the same reasons that I like the others listed above - when his fascinated hyperness with language or punctuation is applied to some themes or ideas the poems can elicit some eye rolling with a more contemporary/this is not the very beginning of the 1960s mode of reading or thinking about poems. However, these don't detract from the energy or enthusiasm of the other poems or the book as a whole, and in many of the darker poems the subdued animation is still used to great (and opposite) effect.
from "Hair"
"Come back, hair, come back!
I want to grow sideburns!
I want to wash you, comb you, sun you, love you!
As I ran from you wild before --
I thought surely this nineteen hundred and fifty nine of now
that I need no longer bite my fingernails
but have handsome gray hair
to show how profoundly nervous I am.
Damned be hair!
Hair that must be plucked from soup! . . . "
Some of Corso's most famous and best poems are here, such as "Marriage" and "Bomb," but what makes this book really work as a collection of poems is the recurring images/ideas that are often very commonplace or simple, the most notable being hair itself, which gets its own titular poem and touchingly reflected on again in "I Held a Shelley Manuscript,"
"Quickly, my eyes moved quickly,
sought for smell for dust for lace
for dry hair!"
Still, some of these don't age so gracefully as others, and I skip many when I read through it, often for the same reasons that I like the others listed above - when his fascinated hyperness with language or punctuation is applied to some themes or ideas the poems can elicit some eye rolling with a more contemporary/this is not the very beginning of the 1960s mode of reading or thinking about poems. However, these don't detract from the energy or enthusiasm of the other poems or the book as a whole, and in many of the darker poems the subdued animation is still used to great (and opposite) effect.
venusarium's review against another edition
5.0
Corso is the most underrated beat writer and it makes me mad 😔
More...