Parallel Play: Poems - Softcover

Burt, Stephanie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1555974376 ISBN 13: 9781555974374

Publisher: Graywolf Press, 2006

Synopsis

The eagerly anticipated second collection by poet and esteemed critic Stephen Burt

Flaunting your useless knowledge has failed you again,
Though it was all they had taught you.
―from "Like a Wreck"

Consult any childhood development guide and you'll find the term "parallel play": when children under two are placed together, they'll play separately but won't interact. They are more fascinated with their immediate surroundings than with each other.

Stephen Burt's second collection of poems, Parallel Play, describes lovers, friends, travelers, and revelers attempting lives dependent on each other but still pulled inevitably into preoccupations of their own self-awareness. When there are many obstacles―overeducation, narcissism, extended adolescence, nomadic existence―how can Americans crawl out of the nursery and coexist if they increasingly have to learn to do so as adults?

About this title

About the Author:

Stephen Burt is the author of a previous poetry collection, Popular Music, and
a work of literary criticism, Randall Jarrell and His Age. He currently teaches at Macalester College and lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

From The Washington Post:

In developmental psychology, the term "parallel play" describes how very young children will play next to each other yet not together. It's an apt title for Stephen Burt's second collection of poems: Many of his subjects seem to know that they belong to a community but feel utterly separate within it.

Burt's poems display an interest in the individual psyche, particularly in young adulthood (in "July Night," the speaker laments: "Is to be adult to be always/ disappointed, or to feign/ satisfaction with what is?") as well as an urge to inhabit the minds of others. In "Self-Portrait as Kitty Pryde," he writes:

I have been identified as gifted & dangerous. People fight over me but not in the ways I want. Who would expect it in a girl from Deerfield, Illinois, town of strict zoning, no neon & quality schools?

One of the recurring surprises in Parallel Play is the breadth of Burt's fascination with contemporary culture (Kitty Pryde is a heroine from the X-Men comic books). A poem written from the perspective of Pierre Bonnard's "Standing Nude" sits next to a villanelle for WNBA player Lindsay Whalen; another explores "Scenes from Next Week's Buffy the Vampire Slayer." One gleans an earnest desire to make poems out of the flotsam and jetsam of American life.The intent is to sensitize readers to the overlooked aspects of contemporary life. These intentions are felt as well in the collection's suite of political poems, which includes a moving elegy to the late Sen. Paul Wellstone as well as a sestina that laments: "It's an old problem: how do we go on being/ so comfortable, and so troubled? Are we poor/ losers? Am I one of the evildoers?"

The true delight of the book, though, is "Six Kinds of Noodles," an irresistible sestina that meditates on the work of John Ashbery and the function of contemporary poetry in the backdrop of an Asian noodle shop. After considering the dizzying array of menu options, the poet-speaker longs for a simple satisfying meal:

And yet the life we long for in all its disorder is not a life of so many tastes, nor of fame; more like one good book, and ginger with which to enjoy it.

Reviewed by Jennifer Grotz
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1555974376
• ISBN 13: 9781555974374
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 80