Circe, After Hours

by Marilyn Kallet and Cleo Qian

Poetry. "Through vivid characters, she examines Jewish life in the American South, in New York, and in the death camps of Europe. She employs the historian's tools in 'speaking the past,' and then,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1886157510
• ISBN13: 9781886157514
• Release Date: January 2005
• Publisher: BkMk Press of the University of Missouri-Kans
• Length: 96 Pages
• Weight: 0.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Circe, singing

Within these pages, we find ourselves in the presence of a modern day Circe, a many- faceted, singer of deeply nuanced songs. She is not afraid of turning taboos inside out, whether it's phone sex (Trout), her own youthful pretensions (Great Poet), or post-menopausal crushes (It Can't Happen). The element of confession is woven into the lyric narratives; images and startling comparisons turn into and against each other, often coupling the everyday with the epic--"Dear Orpheus, listen;/Euridice sings too. She knows more/about dark sweet earth,/how to plant deep and sure--/more than the strumming boys do." (Heartland, Revisited) We consider the puzzle of poems bound by their own rules as Kallet experiments with flexible nonce forms, pantoums, and free-verse narratives tweaked with edgy, outspoken observations--"Jews don't do mummies. Who has time?" in "Cat Mummy" for instance. Original characterizations abound in a world where scorpions are likened to Rockettes, and where marriage("all the hugging we can swallow")and a boa choking on a rat bookend the same poem. Sometimes the twist that makes a subject new is experimental, as in the poem "Where Identity Doesn't Rest." A meditation on memory, the poem's aesthetic tension of traditional narrative moves against a stylistic innovation that recalls Brenda Hillman. The book's three sections combine geography with history, global concerns with the personal. Contradictions cohere in a space where lessons surface in dreams (Circe, Did You?), loss does not mean giving up or giving in (Out of Silence, for Sister Wendy), and melancholy is cast in unexpected images (Jealous). Intellectual scope, both deep and broad, a command of craft, and ease with both colloquial and formal utterance mark the work. Kallet embraces all flesh and blood experience. No subject is off-limits, and humor often thwarts the reader's expectations, in the best possible way. In "No Sale," the poet brings together blues, love, and religion when she asks, "How would a Jewish girl/sell her soul to the devil?/Reformed don't believe/In Beezlebubba" and goes on recap the tale of Robert Johnson, selling his soul "at the crossroads/for a lifetime of hot-lick guitar./Shot by a jealous husband/at the roadhouse, he died on his knees/they say, drunk, barking like a dog./ When she ends the poem with a segue into the personal-- "Odd, for a nice Jewish girl/to fall on her knees./Years though, that's how/it was. Me shot down,/baying at the moon/for a lick of you", we feel the empathetic tug that is a hallmark of effective poetry. Kallet may banter in opening poems such as "No Makeup" but she pulls in around an elegiac tone when it comes to the poems on the Holocaust in the third section. A Lindsay Young Professor of English at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, the poet draws from a deep well of literary and historical knowledge for these stricken poems. Under the poignant heading Breathing Daughters, this sequence singles out one survivor fro

Elegant, humorous, compassionate poems.....

Marilyn Kallet's work has been around for decades now and that richness, that patina of time, shines through in this latest book. With an engaging mix of sly humor and eloquent recollections, she brings readers into her thoughts. Ms. Kallet has learned to see life in everything and face the world on her own terms. Gone is her youthful reticence and propriety, back when she was a young "Great Poet": I was a great poet, composed, understated, subdued. Never let personality leak into a syllable. I wrote psalms with my silences. But with age came wisdom. Reality set in, as in this charming excerpt from "Heartland, Revisited": I'm old enough to be your Meemaw. You chase me like a puppy yapping after a car. If I turned around? Some crush you'd have then. Honey, I'm taking hormone replacement therapy. You're pure testosterone. I can't take you. Her thoughts of death and holocaust are simple and poignant, as in this excerpt from "To My Poem of Hope": Dear poem, if we look again, and we must, we will find scraps, scrawled words, secret histories, the cry between the lines.... Ms. Kallet says with humor that her signature poem is "No Makeup" and I can understand why that would be true. This poet disguises nothing. Lust, regret and sorrow share time equally with laughter and a peaceful acceptance of self: "I'll have to rely on poetry, won't I?" And how, at fifty, I love nakedness in my face and lines, and in your hands, dear reader. As I read the poems in this book, the word "elegant" came to mind more than once. Marilyn Kallet is a strong, courageous, compassionate, humorous woman who writes her humanity in elegant ways.

Clearly documents her abilities as a wordsmith and her mastery of creative writing

The author of ten previous books and currently the editor of "New Millennium Writings" and holder of the Hodges Chair for Distinguished teaching, University of Tennessee--Knoxville, Marilyn Kallet's poetry has appeared in hundreds of publications. Her latest (and enthusiastically recommended!) anthology is Circe, After Hours and clearly documents her abilities as a wordsmith and her mastery of creative writing. Mezuzah: In the doorpost of her house, a hollow/where the mezuzah used to hang,/I press my hand against the indentation,/my way of speaking to the past.//Tough the hollow where the mezuzzah/used to hang. In Horeb, Nazis renamed her street/Hitlerstrasse. My way of speaking to the past/is to listen, press the old men for answers.//1941, Jews were packed into Hitlerstrasse./Now it's a winding picture postcard road,/Jew-free, pleasant as it seemed/before Nazis pressed my family into Judenhausen.//I press my hand against the indentation./Over Horb, a hundred doorposts echo, hollow.

Salsa for the Soul

Kallet's collection is rich with edgy humor and lyric force. Her elegant weave of the personal with the historic and with the idiosycracies of us all reminds me more of Penelope weaving her shroud and unraveling it each night. But the Circe reference is apt for this lament whose heart sparks with life.