Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form

by Matthea Harvey

Overview

Comic, elegaic, and always formally intricate, using political allegory and painterly landscape, philosophic story and dramatic monologue, these poems describe a moment when something marvelous and unforeseen alters the course of a single day, a year, or an entire life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781882295265
Publisher:	Alice James Books
Publication date:	07/01/2002
Pages:	80
Sales rank:	746,625
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

MATTHEA HARVEY is the author of several books of poetry, including Modern Life, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book. Other books include a storybook called The Little General and the Giant Snowflake and an illustrated erasure, Of Lamb. Matthea teaches poetry at Sarah Lawrence and lives in Brooklyn. Learn more at mattheaharvey.com.

Editorial Reviews

The fussy title of Harvey's distinctive, substantial debut gives a pretty good idea of the Victorian-style cathexes within, swooning with "Objective Fatigue" and clutching "More Sketches for a Beautiful Hat." Many poems issue from a space of Wonderland-like decadence, where "tiny tin gutters would be gauche,/ pathetically mimetic" and "irritated he would play with his/ Chameleon putting her on a paisley pillow or tartan/ Scarf." There is a foreboding to such scenes, and a toughness to Harvey's speakers: one "can't be coy after all I've done" and another has "killed one pride only to have another replace it." Pervasive longings are often compressed into a verbal device Harvey may have imported from Turkish poetry, in which the start of a line (here always unpunctuated) is at once the end of one sentence and the start of the next: "this village is closer to the glacier than/ The volcano emits a tiny rumble & drools lava every few/ Years go by..." It's used too often, but the people and pursuits within the poems as a whole certainly vary: a male poet proceeds from the "Vestibulum" to the "Frigidarium" to find his muse within domestic "Thermae"; "Frederick Courtney Selous" exhorts a lover to make a necklace of the stamps from his letters; one poor lover of the title poem casts a bathtub for his beloved only to burn his feet--all with the craft and care of miniature portraiture. While the results, despite watchful self-inoculation, can be precious, the imagination and syntactic dexterity they display are remarkable. (Nov.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Flecked with color and taking lively twists and turns, this first collection displays a rather remarkable breadth. All of the poems are well wrought, displaying verbal acuity and an over-arching structure that lands the reader in the most unexpected places. Such is the case in "Letting Go," which depicts the desire to hold onto the bell pull and to "go clanging up into the sky." The title poem stands out for its humor and the philosophical distinction between the vessel and its contents: "Whenever we want we can pull the plug and get out/ Which is not the case with our own tighter confinement/ Inside the body oh pity the bathtub but pity us too." Highly recommended.--Ann K. van Buren, Riverdale Country Sch., New York Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

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