Grazing: POEMS

by Ira Sadoff

Overview

An experienced and highly respected poet, Ira Sadoff crafts hard-edged scenes, honed on the stuff of real life. From the unblinking honesty of "My Mother's Funeral" to the cultural worship of "At the Movies," Sadoff carves out, with each remarkable line, an unforgettable sensuousness.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780252067372
Publisher:	University of Illinois Press
Publication date:	07/01/1998
Series:	Illinois Poetry Series
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.30(d)

Editorial Reviews

Jerome J. Shestack Prize given by the American Poetry Review for the best poem(s) published in the magazine, 1997.

From the Publisher

A tentative, moody toughness runs through Sadoff's poems, wrenching them into odd shapes, and showing the poet to be suspicious of epiphany even as he courts it. At heart, though, Sadoff (Emotional Traffic) is a romantic, and many of the poems here drift on a tide of bitter retrospection that finds form now in a talky humor ("Go to the zoo. Just pay attention,/ for Christ's sake") now in a kind of stoical despair ("Until the end, when we're indecipherable,/ composed, seraphic, speechless"). In the passage of time, whether it registers images from the war in Vietnam ("When I Come Home"; "In the Dream") or from more private erotic conflicts ("Solitude Etude"; "Biographical Sketch"), Sadoff locates both the origin and the terminus of lament. And though the public and political struggles of the 1960s anchor the poet's open rhetoric--"I want to bury him in southern California/ with the Birchers and Libertarians," he writes in "On the Day of Nixon's Funeral"--his intimate wars on the home front seem even more devastating: "I spent years on my knees while she/ got off before me, her eyes fluttering closed,/ her mind several men away.... " While his pointed rhetoric can occasionally shade into a gruff machismo, this sixth collection is most effective when Sadoff permits himself free play with the demotic, achieving a persuasive blend of sentiment and ironic swagger. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

A tenured radical (Colby College), embraces the '60s in the worst way: his blend of the personal and political always favors the former and trivializes the latter, especially when he becomes an imaginary witness to oppression, whether in Peron's Argentina or at a Selma lunch counter. Sadoff's sixth volume still bears traces of his early deep imagism, but he continues to open up his prosy lines to the grit and junk of American culture, which he catalogues as symptoms of a country rotten with serial killers and "right-wing professors." For all his rage at injustice, Sadoff always returns to himself, or to his relatives-persecuted Communists, Holocaust victims, and a homosexual uncle. Hoping to capture "the sheer magma of it all," Sadoff tries hard to be gritty and shocking, rubbing our noses in "pisshole" towns and dismissing Vivaldi as a "poor obsessive ballless hack." A hateful poem on Richard Nixon makes it harder to sympathize with Sadoff's moments of self-pity in "The Myelogram." With a poetic persona-his "I"-that's more shifty than shifting, he does enjoy lots of good sex, in true Sixties fashion. After admitting meanness to his first wife ("Time and Space"), he celebrates the rapture with his new mate in a number of poems. Sadoff best reveals his aesthetic (or lack of one) in "Language," which disparages the word for the thing itself. With such an uninspired notion and others like it ("Don't you hate metaphors?"), you begin to wonder why Sadoff bothers at all, despite occasional bursts of lyric intensity, unmarred by facile politics.

Kirkus Reviews