a theory of everything

Dec 29, 2013 21:41


        a theory of everything, Mary Crockett Hill, is another Autumn House poetry collection. I'd hoped to read it while I was teaching the poetry course, but that didn't happen.

I will express relief that the rape-incest-child-abuse theme was less prominent in this collection than in other recent reading. (Again, I have nothing against those as subjects of poetry, per se. My complaint is the relentless drumbeat of it that the audience is facing these days.)

This collection is one of the mostly cleverly structured (in sections called "a theory of everything"/"everything before us"/"too much everything"/"everything, lost"/"in spite of everything"/"the end of everything") I've ever read. I found it clever, often unexpected, and amusing. Its title could suggest a scientific or science-fictional view of the world, and that frequently held true. Many of these poems would not have been out of place in the SF poetry markets. (Having myself won an award for a poem about Newton's birthday, I was pleased to find "Newton's Cradle" as one of the offerings; and a good one, too.)

I had five favorites, distributed fairly evenly through the collection:


  • "This is the World"

  • "The Fat Cat"

  • "For Stinky in the Rockies"

  • "Finding Good" (We all need a guide, I suspect...)

  • "Certain Homes in Certain Towns at the End of the World"

    CBsIP: The Wallet of Kai Lung, Ernest Bramah

    Claims for Poetry, Donald Hall, ed.

    The Successful Novelist, David Morrell

    Zoo City, Lauren Beukes

    Personal Memoirs of P. H. Sheridan, Vol. I, P. H. Sheridan

poetry

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