From Publishers Weekly:
Oscar Wilde, who wrote most memorably of "beautiful untrue things," he's not. But in two or three worthy poems in his 10th collection, Feldman passes for Shelly Berman, Don Rickles or Albert Brooks, a comic talent hellbent on sentiment. Mean-spirited misfires nearly sink the book: two disgruntled memoirs of Paul Goodman ("The slugger doesn't hit on the batboy" from "Lives of the Poets"), a fungal series of satire-lets ("How can sharing bread not be true companionship?/ When a shit-eater has you dine from his dish") and a murkily critical reading of poet laureate Robert Pinsky's translation of Dante's Inferno. Feldman's better when practicing self-deprecation without simultaneously trying to even a score, as in the resolutely academic, "Oedipus Host" and "Funny Bones, or Larry Dawn's 1001 Nights in Condolandia." While his talk-show version of Oedipus at Colonus (tonight's guests: Job and Lear) isn't much wittier a concept than one of the less successful Saturday Night Live sketches, he gets points for sheer weirdness and joy at the apotheosis: "Suddenly, this big smile. It's like teeth can see." And that Larry Dawn is supposed to be a cross between Lazarus and Scheherezade somehow doesn't get in the way of the oomph of its gallows schtick. It's too bad the book doesn't make more use of the title character of the best poem here, "Heavenly Muse."
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review:
Bad Brunch
Beautiful False Things
Bust-up
Cartoons
City Of Good Neighbors Blues
Desiring Power Where Surrender Failed
Episode
Funny Bones, Or Larry Dawn's 1001 Nights In Condolandia
Heavenly Muse
Honors! Prizes! Awards! Etc!
Joker
Laura Among The Shades
Les Grandes Passions Manquees
Lives Of The Poets
The Lowdown
Movietime
Oedipus Host
Of This And That, And The Other, And The Fall Of Man
The Parting
Praising Opens
The Purse Of Coy D
The Recognitions
The Retirement
Solange Mistral
'sono Un Poeta....scrivo'
The Switch
Tantrum
Testing The Waters
These Memoirs
They Say And They Repeat
Voluptas
Wisdom: Not For Beginners
Words Out Of Place
You Know What I'm Saying?
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®
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