Stone Crop (Yale Series of Younger Poets) - Hardcover

Gladding, Ms. Jody

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300055439 ISBN 13: 9780300055436

Publisher: Yale University Press, 1993

Synopsis

Jody Gladding's Stone Crop, the winning volume in the 1992 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, was selected from among 700 entries in this annual competition.
Stone Crop is a collection of poems written over the past ten years. Many of the poems represent Gladding's attempts to synthesize landscape with sensibility, to restore the organic world's hold on our human imagination - its gossip value. Other poems try to find an effective political language, free of diatribe but not of outrage, frequently using mythical counterparts to make contemporary events resonate. The poems have other traits in common. Their attention often moves from the thing to its name, underscoring Gladding's conviction that the same organic processes generate both. Many wrestle with their metaphors, expressing the poet's attraction to and suspicion of that poetic device. Many layer images, aiming toward texture rather than pronouncement. And most are, at least to some degree, autobiographical.

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Reviews

In a lukewarm introduction, Dickey (who chose this unimpressive volume for the Yale Younger Poets prize) praises Gladding's kinship with nature. Moving on to the poems, one finds only the most superficial understanding: "The locust thought / she'd die, she laughed / so hard." Couched within prosaic and labored stanzas, the imagery throughout this book is unspecific, hence cliched. "What's true remains there," she says in another nature poem, describing roots buried under snow. Those few poems that contain concrete images are even less believable: "Little boat, / you can bear us / over the dark, over the broken water" a minuscule poem about pregnancy begins; in another poem she writes: "Under the clothesline / I find a whalebone corset / and try it on." Dickey might have more aptly pointed to Gladding's affinities with his own work: the volume's most ambitious piece, an eight-poem sequence on "the eight situations in which it is difficult to see the Buddha or hear the dharma" seems a weak, overlong imitation of his "The Heaven of Animals"; other poems haltingly strive for the dream-like narrative that is Dickey's trademark.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0300055439
• ISBN 13: 9780300055436
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 48