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A review by brice_mo
Incorrect Merciful Impulses by Camille Rankine
2.0
Like many other reviewers on this site, I think Rankine’s titles are incredible, and I wish the poems themselves maintained the same specificity of language. Instead, the individual poems often felt amorphous, and the language was so broad that it often undermined the content.
This may be a matter of personal taste, but at its best, poetry often communicates a memory, whether real or imagined—it’s a shared subjectivity. Within these poems, I never found that. Rankine is obscured by the language, but it rarely reveals anything else.
That said, there was one beautiful set of lines from “Symptoms of Doctrine,” and it felt revelatory of the book's shortcomings:
In all my memories, a story
keeps being rewritten. I am just trying
to be merciful. Is that honesty?
In the end, it feels like Rankine’s “Incorrect Merciful Impulses” protect both the reader and herself, and the result is an oddly detached body of work.
This may be a matter of personal taste, but at its best, poetry often communicates a memory, whether real or imagined—it’s a shared subjectivity. Within these poems, I never found that. Rankine is obscured by the language, but it rarely reveals anything else.
That said, there was one beautiful set of lines from “Symptoms of Doctrine,” and it felt revelatory of the book's shortcomings:
In all my memories, a story
keeps being rewritten. I am just trying
to be merciful. Is that honesty?
In the end, it feels like Rankine’s “Incorrect Merciful Impulses” protect both the reader and herself, and the result is an oddly detached body of work.