5 Acorns <\/p>\n
I don\u2019t always develop notions about a book based on the title alone, but when I heard the title of Dorianne Laux\u2019s fifth and latest collection of poetry, I began to make some assumptions. The Book of Men. Surely here we would have a series of male portraits, a parade of the men that have traipsed through Laux\u2019s life, some meditations on their significance, a few resounding proclamations about the penile Other. <\/p>\n
How wrong I was.<\/p>\n
While there are some stunning portraits of men here \u2014 a traveling soldier studied at an airport, an unruly foster brother, a hard-boiled homicide detective, an aging Mick Jagger strutting on television \u2014 the book\u2019s most memorable poems concern women. <\/p>\n
The most poignant of these is a pair of poems about a mother suffering from dementia. \u201cLost in Costco\u201d finds her meandering through \u201cthe city\/ of canned goods and 30-lb. sacks\/ of dog food\u201d before settling at a piano and \u201cfaking it, picking out the tunes, striking\/ a chord like she\u2019d do when we were young.\u201d The poem\u2019s strength lies in its slow revelation of the mother\u2019s declining mind, a situation built on details and word choice and ending with the heartbreaking final lines: \u201c\u2026she\u2019d say sing it to me and we\u2019d hum\/ a few bars: pop songs and Top 40 hits,\/ TV theme songs or chewing gum jingles,\/ our high, sweet voices giving her\/ so little to go on.\u201d<\/p>\n
When the mother returns twenty pages later in \u201cMother\u2019s Day,\u201d her dementia seems to have progressed, so that she is like a child relearning the names of things. The narrator-daughter affirms the novel connections her mother makes: \u201cI tell her about Amelia Earhart and she asks\/ Air? and points to the ceiling. Asks Heart?\/ and points to her chest. Yes, I say\u2026When I recite lines from Gone\/ with the Wind she sits up and says Potatoes!\/ and I say, Right again.\u201d The narrator, perhaps Laux herself, does not so much comfort her mother as find in the horror of senility a measure of beauty in the almost poetic turn that an emptying mind takes.<\/p>\n
Laux balances the intensely personal with plentiful portraits of male and female pop culture icons peppered throughout the book. Her desire to be a young, awkward Cher and her paradoxical admiration for the distinctly un-regal \u201cmonarch\u201d Mick Jagger are fairly straightforward, but \u201cBob Dylan\u201d is more enigmatic, possibly an oblique memoir in the voice of the venerable songwriter.<\/p>\n
I wasn\u2019t wrong about the book\u2019s containing a meditation on the male Other, however. \u201cMen\u201d is a tongue-in-cheek commiseration over the tribulations of maleness, declaring, \u201cIt\u2019s tough being a guy, having to be gruff\/ and buff, the strong silent type, having to laugh\/ it off\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
Sure, Laux gets us men. <\/p>\n
She gets everything right.<\/p>\n
Publisher: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
\nYear: 2011
\n91 pages
\n$24.95<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
While there are some stunning portraits of men here \u2014 a traveling soldier studied at an airport, an unruly foster brother, a hard-boiled homicide detective, an aging Mick Jagger strutting on television \u2014 the book\u2019s most memorable poems concern women.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24030,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[382,595],"tags":[685,683,684],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11408"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24030"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11408"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11408\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}