Reviews | Contents

• The Dwarf Cycle
• Shrift: A Winter Sequence
• A Hacksaw Brightness
• Toccatta Of The Disturbed Child
• General Comments

Reviews of The Dwarf Cycle

Dwarf, of course, symbolizes all of us who bear our maimings of body and spirit, with differing degrees of success, through this smouldering world. Miss Strongin's book is superbly crafted. She is a young poet whose work has already appeared in various anthologies; she is at the start of an important career. 

This book reads as if it were one long poem, because it moves together like a body in a ball, tight, packed, like the Dwarf’s body—it glows from the intensity of space. The images, the poems don’t hesitate; they can’t afford to be sluggish. They ignite, one line to one stanza to the next—instant forest fire. These poems are not slight, although they move quickly, with agility, and though they come from the center of strong emotions and thoughts, they don’t lose touch with the lyrical sweep. . .

The Dwarf’s curse on you is the curse on the careless, the name callers, the insensitive who lead the real stunted lives while exhibiting a nice normal front. The Dwarf’s song for you comes back, like “mica-light” —you reflect it if you are open to its joy —‘the light that corrects the crooked shadow’ can be recognized in these poems, can help correct our own dwarfed beings, show us that we can become bigger than ourselves. 

At her best, Strongin can startle with an image that is hard, bold, sharp: “The glassblowers’s hands/ will be blown off in the cold.” When she is not quite so good, she tends to be a bit too ethereal for my taste, as in the dream island “ringed by a pool of light, not water,/ sanctified, the island.” This ethereality, however, is on purpose. And perhaps it works, for here the speaker concludes: “I see this island perilously drifting:/ shadowed by an even darkening chain.” Is the dream a message from the unconscious that warns of impending doom, of death?

Shrift is, moreover, a mystical poem, an old-fashioned mystical poem. . . . But if Strongin is mystical, she is never far away from what she calls “A Severe Sense Of Everyday Life/ lacking all religious trappings....” Further down in the same poem she notes: “The Angel-choir tries to sing/ but cold has closed their windpipes.” This is good; this is original.

Shrift deserves a thorough reading. It is a unified and meaningful statement about a desert winter of the spirit, and I think it succeeds in being “no cold marble vision,” for, as Strongin puts it in the concluding poem, “we live on/ while life grows richer, narrow to the bone.” 

This is not a book for those who want happy images. It is a book for those who seek a match between words and our most difficult experience: “A severe sense of everyday life/ lacking all religious trappings” (from “Shrift VII”). . . .

Lynn Strongin’s poetry here in Shrift is mysterious. She does not say what it is about. She presents images and asks the reader to accept them, to match his or her own story against them. . . . It is old-fashioned in an age of overwhelmingly personal confession. Yet it is a confession. . . .

There are too many images and lessons in Shrift to be comprehended in one review or many readings. This is a book to be saved and taken out in winter and at times of loss. There is such strength in its austerity, such relief in its refusal to smooth things over, that one feels freed and gifted by the vision. 

This is a poetry of the emergencies of consciousness in conflict with excrutiating recollections. Half of this brief volume is devoted to hospital poems, and other pieces—“Sexton” and “Van Gogh”—reiterate an obsession with trauma. . . . 

The terse decorum of Strongin’s hospital poems reins in an extraordinary lyric sense, whose flights hang on an intensely willed sanity in the face of disaster . . . . Their lavish sensual imagery depicts an absorption in a heightened accounting, a tally of psychological facts, of a completely interior vision. . . .

Strongin exemplifies that rare young poet whose motifs generally are gauged for anxieties about sanity and pain yet, despite the tiredness of the confessional school, woos the reader by dint of sheer lyricism and imagination.
 

Strongin has been published well before, but not this well. This book is a disturbing account of the fragility of human awareness, of the dangers inherent in every movement, of misery lying hand in hand with the beauties of childhood, or reflection. The voice of the poems will not be denied; the compulsion to sing bizarre and sometimes twisted songs is both definite and curious. Strongin landscapes a strange world, then invites one in. It is a trip worth taking.
 

TOCCATA is a very “disturbing” book (very enigmatic, Exacto-knife images) about the death from leukemia of a young boy. At least the whole last part of the book is about the leukemia-death; the first part, the “Toccata” itself, seems to be mainly about the author as developing observer (child herself) developing toward that stage in her life-time when she’ll be forced to see her child die right in front of her.

Image after image hits you, sometimes like lyrics out of an old Grateful Dead album or like an old ballad . . . . Fairytales, with all their overtones, are brought in . . . . It’s like this all the way through, Death riding the rail of Myth. It’s very “difficult” poetry, will-of-the-wispish, evanescent; it wants to escape you, doesn’t want to be nailed down or defined. It took me three readings to “get” it; on the third reading I came away feeling I’d been under the spell of a classic. 

Lynn Strongin writes about pain and strength in a striking way. Certainly she is not typical of the soft-centered seventies, when the goal was personal pleasure and self-fulfillment. Nor is she like the Extremist poets, who wrote almost exclusively about their own mental anguish. . . . Her mood is similar to that of a child with cancer in one of her poems— “determined not angry”— and this tone results in poems that go right to our nerve endings because they are so finely controlled. One of her major preoccupations has been to explore “the relation between poetry and medicine” . . . . In this concern with medicine, she resembles the German poet Gottfied Benn; although her hospital scenes are not as naturalistic as his, they are just as harrowing.

. . . her personal experience appears only obliquely in her poems. Her paradoxical combination of reticence and intensely personal, bone-aching events allows her poems to transcend her particular experience and refer to suffering in the widest sense.

It may be as disturbing to read Strongin’s poems as it is to endure life at certain times. But because they confront and transcend life’s bonds so boldly the reader feels a breathtaking sense of clarity and freedom. 

I was immediately taken by her care, even fastidiousness, with words and by her sense of the line. For her, it was more than simply a place to turn back from and go on to the next line. Her lines were flexible, even elastic, without any suggestion of uptightness (p.70).

The voice in Lynn Strongin’s A Hacksaw Brightness is unmistakable. If there is any resemblance, it is to the poetry of Hopkins, with its frequently inverted word order, heightened language and strong syllables that emphasize the weight of each individual sound, the unpredictable shifts in tempo. Even if, unlike Hopkins, it is the atmosphere of devotion rather than its object that draws our poet’s admiration, the melody and rhythm are paramount. She is in love with innocence and a number of poems take the form of elegies for innocent girls or hospital roommates who have died. But she is attached to the living, alive to the dynamics of light, the earth quickened by the sun. Her ability to communicate the force of light in its crude form is manifest in these last lines of “Van Gogh”: “To come home to a lamp’s murkish yellow;/ to bend like crude animals, yet gods, over a plate of potatoes.” (p.89)