I Can't Remember: Poems - Hardcover

MacDonald, Cynthia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679454578 ISBN 13: 9780679454571

Publisher: Knopf, 1997

Synopsis

"Cynthia Macdonald's poems are quite extraordinary in their range and daring. She is brilliantly versatile in adopting the views, attitudes, or moods of fictive or actual persons different from herself, and she does so with a delicate empathy. She can be remarkably witty, as well as deeply moving, and sometimes even ruthless in her insights, which are more like X rays than snapshots. She is a poet of many skills and formidable dexterity."
--ANTHONY HECHT

This book further extends the range of Cynthia Macdonald's ambition and achievement. From the beginning her poems have read like letters from the unconscious, full of wit, drama, invention, and intelligence. In the last decade, without sacrificing those pleasures, her work has deepened, becoming more passionate, more lyrical; the language, as Edmund White described it, "silvery, transparent, harmonious."

All these qualities remain, but to them has been added a kind of wisdom about where we are, where we have been, and where we may be going. She asks questions more often than she gives answers, testifying that "what is clear is never really clear."  Yet the reader closes the book bathed "in the clarifying light that glances off the winter road,"  and in the feeling of desire of "Vermeer's Lady Reading at an Open Window."

Praising Cynthia Macdonald's poems, Carol Muske once noted that they "alter everything we take for granted in poetry,"  and, in another review, Liz Rosenberg remarked on the poems' "gorgeous, almost baroque quality.  Her work continues to surprise and please--and disturb."

About this title

Review:

Anthony Hecht gets right to the heart of it when he describes Cynthia Macdonald's poems as "more like X rays than snapshots." She sees through her subjects, and into them. This is true in "Leonardo's Advice to Artists" ("The sea makes it clear / rest is impossible"), in the intricate and heart-breaking "Children Who Fall Off the Edge of the World Because of Secrets," and in the darkly humorous villanelle "What Is Never Lost." These poems marry theme and form, narrative and imagery, outrage and solace. The last three lines of Macdonald's book demonstrate her skill: "Let's move along the lot of circumstance / and find such water as we can. For we / are near the twice-ruled boundary of our plot."

From the Back Cover:

"Cynthia Macdonald's poems are quite extraordinary in their range and daring. She is brilliantly versatile in adopting the views, attitudes, or moods of fictive or actual persons different from herself, and she does so with a delicate empathy. She can be remarkably witty, as well as deeply moving, and sometimes even ruthless in her insights, which are more like X rays than snapshots. She is a poet of many skills and formidable dexterity."
--ANTHONY HECHT

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0679454578
• ISBN 13: 9780679454571
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 78