Woman Police Officer in Elevator

by James Lasdun

Overview

"American readers who want to see rejuvenated form in untroubled action, giving brisk shape to contemporary and classical events, will find it in Lasdun." —Helen Vendler

With this, his second collection of poetry, James Lasdun consolidates his reputation as a writer of rich, emotionally charged poems of utter virtuosity. The poems in this book concern themselves with transformations, dislocations, and metamorphoses. Vividly rendered landscapes from Tuscany to New Jersey evolve into meditations on love, myth, and sexual and social politics. Woman Police Officer in Elevator is a rigorous and compelling mix of the classical and the cosmopolitan.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393318388
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	12/17/1998
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	82
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

James Lasdun is the author of Afternoon of a Faun, The Fall Guy, The Horned Man, Seven Lies, several poetry and short story collections, and a memoir. He lives in Brooklyn.

Editorial Reviews

In his second collection (following A Jump Start, Norton, 1989), the British-born Lasdun produces poems that may seem incredibly stilted to American ears, e.g., "you stand in the exfoliated green of your own past." Obscure classical references replace hard-won original imagery, e.g., "Pisano's virgin, or Berlusconi's belles." The volume's longest piece, a rhymed narrative bemoaning conservation-protected land turned into shopping malls and fast-food restaurants by a modern-day Erysichthon, does little more than trivialize its subject, presenting inanities such as the Iroquois woman who prays to "Demeter, Ishtar, Ceres." Such comic figures, in Lasdun's clumsy hands, are more appropriate to verse than poetry. Readers coming across this misplaced volume will be disappointed.-Rochelle Ratner, formerly Poetry Editor, "Soho Weekly News," New York

Library Journal