[(Dance and Disappear)] [Author: Laura Kasischke] published on (July, 2002)

by Laura Kasischke

The subject matter of these poems is ordinary: motherhood, marriage, sexuality, middle age, ambivalence, mortality, the Midwest. But in addressing these topics, Laura Kasischke finds and reveals the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B00Y30JJ1E
• Release Date: July 2002
• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press

Customer Reviews

Burning up the pages

Laura Kasischke is reigning master of the half-said, and in Dance and Disappear, her fourth book of poetry, she delights once again with her vivid imagery and transient style, a heady mixture of the lyrical and macabre. The poems often change course so swiftly that even an astute reader can lose the thread - only to reemerge, two stanzas later, from out of the blue. "Day", for example, shifts at light speed from lost keys to a sparrows nest to a hat her husband wore in the jungle, the only link being the different days of the week on which she notices them. Until we get to Saturday, when:the library's stone lions runfreely through the streetsAnd at this very height of madness, suddenly, somehow it all makes sense. You get the excited feeling that black magic is being performed in front of you, and read the poem several more times, compulsively, until you can make your peace with it.Dance and Disappear has the feel of a transitional work, with themes from Kasischke's previous two books, Housekeeping in a Dream and Fire & Flower, reemerging along with a few hints of what we might expect in the future. Housekeeping's fascination with youth, death and sex surfaces again here in poems like "Spontaneous Human Combustion" and "Bike Ride with Older Boys". The poems have the trick of setting ordinary details at an unsettling angle, such as these lines from "Black Car":Once, a black car pulledinto my drivewayand pulled back out.That afternoon, the sunwas an eye on firein the sky.But it had its headlights on.Fire & Flower revolved mainly around motherhood, and there are several poems here in that vein as well - "My Son in the Cereal Isle", for example, where the narrator loses her child (briefly) in a grocery store. A few poems fuse the two themes, and step beyond them into the the realm of philosophy. "Back of the North Wind", for instance describes an imaginary place of perfect weather where people are nonetheless sad:... Onlyone drunken bus driver has ever gone and come back.Rather than seeming cryptic or evasive, the poem seems to be trying very hard to tell us something that could not be conveyed in any other words.Kasischke's style is not particularly original - Baudelaire was describing carrion in the road a hundred years ago, and Robet Lowell was writing with autobiographical intimacy in the 1950's. What sets Kasischke apart is her imagination, the intuitive way she arranges her brief images like picture stills to give us a glimpse clarity so pure that it seems almost madness. The title of the book, as Kasischke explains in "The Visibility of Spirits", comes from a Bisquick Box: "The skillet is ready when a few drops of water sprinkled on it dance and disappear". The same applies this collection of poems. Some refuse to ignite. Others are interesting but so cryptic you want to get the poet's number, call her up in the middle of the night and ask "So, Laura, what was THAT all about?" But a good many do actually dance and one or two may even

Most Interesting Poet in America

Some might accuse Kasischke of being a poet's poet, but maybe the problem is that the world of poetry readers hasn't quite caught up with what she's doing yet, but the poets themselves have begun to catch on. The moments of brilliance and transcendence illuminate these pages, but are held together with an eerie music and a quick wit. Laura Kasischke is one of the most interesting poets to come along in decades, and this is her most interesting book.