The Rim Benders

by Lola Haskins

Poetry. "Lola Haskins writes with the startling freedom and grace of a kite flying, and with the variety and assurance of invention that reveal, in image after image, the dream behind the waking... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0938078704
• ISBN13: 9780938078708
• Release Date: November 2001
• Publisher: Anhinga Press
• Length: 64 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.

Customer Reviews

The work of an ever growing (and musical) talent!

Lola Haskins most recent volume of poetry is one of her finest. Haskins "has taught Computer Science at the University of Florida since the late 1970's, and lives on a farm outside Gainesville with her husband, Gerald, and assorted dogs, cats, ducks, and peacocks." Thus she could rightly be called a 'regional poet,' but her stretch and breath go much farther and deeper than that. This poet was not formed by the Iowa workshop. She is, instead: direct, frank, funny, honest, painful. She reminds me of Emily Dickinson, with her microscopic attention to detail, the hard work it must take to build image on top of image, and in her private, odd manner and cadences. One imagines how many poems Haskins has not written or published, and reads carefully between her lines. In a sequence like "Six Ways" to play a staccato, the images build (almost absentmindedly) from "The beehived secretary's brisk heels/click across the polished floor" to "He was wondering over red or white roses. The barrage/comes so quickly it seems all one sound." I love how she begins a poem by saying, "In Florida, when the forty-foot limo slows, Mickey Mouse gets out." The fourth section of the book is the most personal, in that it evokes strong feelings and memories about her parents. Many of those poems are written in near prose, as if Haskins is careful not to turn her memories easily into poetry. There are no resolutions in those poems, but not any self-pity either. Sometimes, in all of her books, Haskins seems to view her own life from a bemused, interested distance. But the reader feels very close to this poet and her world indeed.

Moving, evocative, sometimes frightening free verse poems

The Rim Benders: Poems And Discourses is an impressive selection of moving, evocative, sometimes frightening free verse poems by Lola Haskins, winner of the 1994 Emily Dickinson Prize from the Poetry Society of America. The essence and spirt of Mexican culture is a particularly memorable theme in her work. Under a spreading sky, blue-pink as a wild egg, / a woman makes a bouquet of her life; / baby's breath, alyssum, sweet lobelia, / rosebuds of palest gold.