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xterminal's review
4.0
Katy Lederer, The Heaven-Sent Leaf (BOA Editions, 2008)
There are few better ways to get me to read a book of poetry than to have it blurbed by Liz Willis, one of my favorite contemporary poets. Combine that with the book in question being by Katy Lederer, whom I'd never read before but who is the daughter of Richard Lederer (of the Anguished English books) and sister to Howard Lederer and Annie Duke, poker players extraordinaire, and that's pretty much a guarantee. Given all that, I was pretty sure this wasn't going to be a question of whether I liked it, but how much.
“I am taken by the minster
He lays his soul to rest.
He is clean as a dove and is lovely.
Like the general drift,
He is caught, as if in a net.
Welted with his longing
For his archangelic mother,
Like a people or father
He loses her among the waves....”
(“The General Drift”)
Lederer plays it straight and simple here, choosing her words with care and her images with precision, and in the end that is all we can ask of poems. These are solid pieces, and very very good ones, and the only real snipe I'd take at the book is that it seems like it was a little too loosely-tied for a concept piece. That, however, is not a problem with the work itself as much as it is how the work is packaged; these poems still demand your time and attention, and this is guaranteed to hit my best reads of the year list somewhere. ****
There are few better ways to get me to read a book of poetry than to have it blurbed by Liz Willis, one of my favorite contemporary poets. Combine that with the book in question being by Katy Lederer, whom I'd never read before but who is the daughter of Richard Lederer (of the Anguished English books) and sister to Howard Lederer and Annie Duke, poker players extraordinaire, and that's pretty much a guarantee. Given all that, I was pretty sure this wasn't going to be a question of whether I liked it, but how much.
“I am taken by the minster
He lays his soul to rest.
He is clean as a dove and is lovely.
Like the general drift,
He is caught, as if in a net.
Welted with his longing
For his archangelic mother,
Like a people or father
He loses her among the waves....”
(“The General Drift”)
Lederer plays it straight and simple here, choosing her words with care and her images with precision, and in the end that is all we can ask of poems. These are solid pieces, and very very good ones, and the only real snipe I'd take at the book is that it seems like it was a little too loosely-tied for a concept piece. That, however, is not a problem with the work itself as much as it is how the work is packaged; these poems still demand your time and attention, and this is guaranteed to hit my best reads of the year list somewhere. ****
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