The Tormented Mirror

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Editorial Reviews

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To echo Mark Twain's famous warning to his readers, attempting to locate a motive, moral or plot in any of these 73 miniature narrative poems is ill-advised. "The Babies" begins: "He wanted to know what she had in her blouse that heaved so nicely when she moved./ My babies, she said as she opened her blouse and showed him her breasts." The poem does not develop much further, and the rest of the work here pointedly does not boast much more sophistication. Like carnival mirrors in which images are distorted and exaggerated for low entertainment, the images they reflect are vulgar and most often sexist: "The Flower Pot" asks "wouldn't the nice gentleman like to drop a seed or two into an old lady's flowerpot?"; "Night Song" clarifies the fact that "If mice are interested in human hair it is the hair found at the lower end of a woman's torso. They love the idea of secret passageways." When the circus actually does come to town, it's an occasion for remembering how "the last time... it left a fat lady dumped on the sidewalk like a pile of varicose cottage cheese wearing lingerie." None of this is a departure for Edson, who, in over 12 small-press books of similar vignettes (selected by Oberlin in The Tunnel) and a novel (The Song of Percival Peacock, from Coffee House), has taken Ivy Compton-Burnett-style domestic strife and banter further than most might care to go. The amount of ironic violence on these pages is indeed startling; as Pauline Kael once said of Billy Wilder's movies, these poems "pull out laughs the way a catheter draws urine." (Apr.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780822957638
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date: 2/28/2001
Pages: 96
Series: Pitt Poetry Series
Product dimensions: 5.50 (w) x 7.50 (h) x 0.40 (d)

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

THE HAUNTED HOUSE

Now the house of earth was not always a house. There was a time when nothing rotted. A time only of sanitary atoms. There were no smells, no blood clots, no flowers, no mice. And the earth was with egg or sperm.

Death arrived with life. They were lovers from the beginning. They fed each other. Life fed death, but death also fed life. It was their habit, they could not live without the other.

The God said, let there be life, but let it be guarded by death ...

THE SECRET CRAVEYARD

Elephants like burlap underwear. It wears better than silk and has more style.

They're shy about this appetite. Underwear embarrasses them.

When the desire overtakes them they head for the secret graveyard of elephants. No one knows where that is. They feel safe there.

Surrounded by the bleached bones of their ancestors they shyly submit themselves to the delicious feel of burlap. They feel more naked wearing it. They don't know why, and so they giggle.

Of course they cannot reenter the forest wearing underwear. A hyena might laugh. Tarzan is another thought ...

Sadly they must leave their underwear in the bones of their ancestors.

They remember to murmur brief prayers as they leave ...

A LETTER FROM HOME

One night a man's shadow died. Slumping, it groped its heart and dripped down the wall into a dark stain on the floor in the shape of a man who died in his bedroom alone ...

The man writes home: Dear mom, my shadow is dead. I may have to be reborn, if you and dad are up to it, and have a new shadow attached ...

His mother writes back: Dear Ken, please don't count on it. In truth, dear, given another chance I think I would ask for an abortion ...

CHARACTERS

After certain difficulties a family decides to become a cast of characters in a play. The setting to be the interior of a house much like their own. In fact, exactly like their own.

They'll go on living their regular lives, but now their lives won't be real. Father will play the father, and mother will play the mother. Dick and Jane, their real children, will play Dick and Jane, their stage children ...

AN OLD WOMAN'S CHILDREN

An old woman had given birth to a litter of mice. They were all over the bed.

In the morning when she awakened she saw that she was mistaken, and had given birth to a litter of rats.

Rats, mice, what's the difference? cried her husband, our bed's infested with baby rodents.

Because when I give birth to mice I like them to be mice. Not all of a sudden discover they're rats. Rats are okay, it's just that when I give birth I like to know what I'm giving birth to ...

What about all these clams? cried her husband.

That was another night, the restaurant was dark, but the waiter had promised oysters ...

GENITAL SECRETS

A woman is asked if her baby is a boy or a girl.

I don't know, I've never looked. I don't think it right that one invade the privacy of the diaper, that place of genital secrets.

But wouldn't you like to know if it's a boy or a girl?

If it develops whiskers I'll call it Henry. And if it doesn't I'll call it Henrietta, said the woman.

But supposing it develops feathers?

Then I'll put yesterday's newspaper on the floor of its cage and offer it a cracker, said the woman. But should it develop whiskers I'll call it Henry. And if it doesn't I'll call it Henrietta and offer it another cracker ...

Excerpted from THE TORMENTED MIRROR by Russell Edson. Copyright © 2001 by Russell Edson. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

	The Haunted House	3
	The Secret Graveyard	4
	A Letter From Home	5
	Characters	6
	An Old Woman's Children	7
	Genital Secrets	8
	Monkey Achievement	8
	That ...	10
	Sweet Tooth	11
	The Babies	12
	The Flowerpot	13
	The Glandular Condition	14
	The Key	15
	The Laws	16
	The New Father	17
	The Position	18
	The Sleeper's Dark	19
	The Tormented Mirror	20
	Where Charity Begins	21
	The Antiques Shop	25
	Accidents	26
	Baby Pianos	27
	Balls	28
	Madam's Heart	29
	Meanwhile ...	30
	Pork Chops	31
	Sleep	32
	The Academic Sigh	33
	A Redundancy of Horses	34
	The Alfresco Moment	35
	The Bloodworthy Correspondence	36
	The Breast	37
	The Clock	38
	The Horse of Fashion	39
	Sunset	40
	Urinating	41
	On the Writing of a Prose Poem	42
	Poetry	45
	Bread	46
	Feathers	47
	Medical Stew	49
	Nocturne	50
	One Who Bathes in Moonlight	51
	Symmetry	52
	The Fruit Bowl	53
	The Joy Attendant on the Little Journey	54
	The Message	55
	The Passion	56
	The Rabbit Story	57
	Night Song	58
	The Square Wheel	59
	The Stuff of Dreams	60
	The Traveling Circus	61
	The Veterinarian	62
	Under Great Light Flooded Clouds	63
	The Grinding	67
	Allegory	68
	Angels	69
	An Observer of Incidentality	70
	Sanity	72
	Round	73
	Chickens	74
	Nice	75
	The Encounter	76
	The Bath	77
	The Night Invaded	78
	The Method	79
	The Reality Argument	80
	The Theory	82
	The Twilight of the Gods	84
	Thus Spake Polly	85
	The Rule and Its Exception	86
	Wings	87

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Anonymous

Posted September 3, 2001

Taken By Surprise, We Laughed As A Family Dreams It Should

While pulling books off the shelf at Barnes and Noble, I read a piece out this book..something struck me immediately as funny.. I handed it to my wife, who read a couple of poems in the aisle. Hysterical. We bought the book and took it out to the car, where we drove around (me, wife, three kids), taking turns reading the poems and laughing until we had read the whole book. A fun afternoon. We all wished for more. So...I would suggest if you have teenagers and have to travel by car as a family, bring this book along. If your kids like the inane, bizarre, yet surprising and fun, you will, as we did, add a fun memory to your family's journal of existence....Check it out.
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The Tormented Mirror

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Taken By Surprise, We Laughed As A Family Dreams It Should