Louise in Love

by Mary Jo Bang

Overview

In this stunning new collection of poems, Mary Jo Bang jettisons the reader into the dreamlike world of Louise, a woman in love. With language delicate, smooth, and wryly funny, Louise is on a voyage without destination, traveling with a cast of enigmatic others, including her lover, Ham. Louise is as musical as she is mysterious and the reader is invited to listen. In her world, anything goes, provided it is breathtaking. Bang, whose first collection was the prize-winning Apology for Want, both parodies and pays homage to the lyric tradition, borrowing its lush music and dramatic structure to give new voice to the old concerns of the late Romantic poets. Louise in Love is a dramatic postmodern verse-novel with an eloquent free-floating narration. The poems, rife with literary allusion, take journeys to distant lands. And, like anyone on a voyage without a destination, they are endlessly questioning of the enigmatic world around them.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802137609
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	12/14/2000
Edition description:	1 ED
Pages:	80
Sales rank:	572,249
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

Editorial Reviews

This is not a book about silent screen star Louise Brooks, despite her photo on the book's cover, seeming references to the notoriously alcoholic Brooks's many lost weekends, and persistent echoes of the 1920s throughout. Bang's (Apology for Want) "dramatis personae" in these serial poems include, among many others, Louise; her sister, Louise; her lover, Ham; and Ham's brother, Charles. Nothing much happens, but sensibilities are conveyed with accurate emotions and a liberally deployed knowledge of the arts. Like many of the louche denizens of Brooks's era, Bang's characters can overdo the alliteration and borrowing of musicality of foreign languages, whether French or Italian: "Louise dreamed a clowder of cats was eating yesterday's dinner.../ December, a drear pentimento--unveiling the mouth...." The sardonic "Here's a Fine Word: Prettiplease" has some of the world-weary tone of Jean Rhys and Dorothy Parker, but the dominant influence here may be John Berryman's Henry, who harkened back in a similarly multi-vocal fashion. And Louise's problems in her love affair with Ham (along with their erotic doubles) point to a wry gay subtext la Djuna Barnes. While some readers will find the clowder of characters and their Edward Gorey-like diction cloying, others will delight in Bang's unsparing ("Diaphragmatic heaving. Base emetic act./ The puky little sun glowing to a glare. Puissance.") time-channeling. (Jan.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Bang's second collection will try many patient readers with its surface of brilliant word play teased by a hint of narrative. The list of characters include Louise, a young woman in love; her sister, Lydia; her lover, Ham Gorden; his brother, Charles Gorden; and a child named Isabella, suggesting a graspable plot. But Louise's love voyage from innocence to experience is decidedly nonlinear. If you can approach this kind of writing with an open mind, you will be enchanted by some of the d cor, including the retro-style courtship of Louise and Ham, the literary allusions (those that you catch, of course), and the brilliant, sonorous juxtapositions: "The wrists tiny veinlets sunk/ while gravity's gooseherd gathered the minion capillaries." Bang can't stop inventing and accumulating these gems; from "a clowder of cats" to "a dart in the eye of Ifdom," brief moments congeal, though not with any clear destination in mind. There are only fragments of sex, ennui, Keats, and Virginia Woolf, in "a fantastic sea where nothing but nothing can save us." By the end, Bang runs the risk of losing her readers, but she seems to be having too good a time to care. For academic collections.--Ellen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine LLP Law Lib., New York Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Bang's new collection is a series of short- to medium-length lyrics disguised as a verse-novel about a woman named Louise, and a few shadowy figures besides. It is not altogether successful in being a novel, because it does not finally want to be one—although the disguise is important. Louise is, in some ways, an identifiable character: she is prone to fits of whimsy, she admires extravagance for its own sake, and she is a resolute onanist—although more discreet than Whitman. But her consistency of character is not paralleled by a process of growth or change; it is instead turned toward an improbable linguistic experiment, in which Bang rings as many variations as possible on the theme of stasis, which she suggestively terms,"The danger of languid and largo." That Bang succeeds at all in this experiment is testament to her genius for improvisation and her commitment to making things new. Occasionally, she lets her hand show too plainly and the result is drab, but there are many moments of reverie where Louise is given a preternatural, ecstatic sharpness of vision:"She stood on a rise overlooking a road / alongside a lake that flowed into another, / and another, and another like hours / babbling their latebreaky news." There is a loneliness in these lines stronger than the romance promised in the collection's title. One suspects, in the end, that love is both too serious and too silly for Louise,"a mind that knows nothing of boundaries," and calls itself"the erotic singsong of motion." It is the playfulness of these poems, the erotics of words among words, that makes them memorable and argues their importance. Don't be fooled by the frou-frou: thisgirlcan dance.

Kirkus Reviews