Paul Bunyan's Bearskin: Poems - Softcover

Goedicke, Patricia

9780915943548: Paul Bunyan's Bearskin: Poems

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0915943549 ISBN 13: 9780915943548

Publisher: Milkweed Editions, 1992

Poems discuss relations between family members, illness, the changes in life that distance friends from each other, and life in the Midwest

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From Publishers Weekly:

Goedicke's ( The Tongues We Speak ) collection of 46 poems addresses problems of contemporary history, such as nuclear proliferation and imperialism, as well as struggles of the individual against anger and loneliness. In general, the voice is overwrought and the poems lack the precise focus that might be achieved by a more dispassionate eye. Sometimes generalizations about global politics guide the speaker to muddled conclusions, as when she compares police brutality in South Korea, Latin America, the Soviet Union and the United States and finds them interchangeable. The narration frequently presents a litany of suffering, but the melodramatic tone tips the scales too quickly and undercuts serious ideas: "Everyday more suicides / Among the living, more hangovers / Among the dead." The overuse of the extended line and its enjambment to the following stanza ("For the corpses pile up everywhere: / in the middle of everyone's kitchen . . . ) causes irony to turn preposterous. Goedicke's poetry reflects the anxiety of the approach of a new century. She acknowledges as much, referring to the poet as an "exhausted doodler." The despair imparted in her poems is exhausting but not emotionally convincing.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

"Faster than the eye can flick/ up one corridor, down another/ zap, quicksilver/tiny pogo stick jumping." As these lines illustrate, Goedicke's "grasshopper of the self" leaps throughout her 46 restless, frontier-immediate, Whitmanesque poems. People depicted here are animated by "the live rippling spirit of a bear taking up his bed/ and walking, no one can predict how or when or where." The delight of this collection is the "electric shining" with which Goedicke places specific images in the "Heart/Land": "The father's hands are beautiful/ but grasping, they reach up out of the rented bed/ like crabs in a bucket." In "The Lake Itself," a fine, moving poem, "our homesick selves . . . are drowned jewels" who leap up, "Again/ and again like dragonflies,/ In quick flashes of glitter/ The body never forgets a baptism,/ Its first eye opening plunge into/ And then out of the light." Her poems are indeed "quick flashes of glitter." Goedicke, who teaches at the University of Montana at Missoula, has written eight collections of poetry. Recommended for public and academic libraries where poetry is collected seriously.
- Frank Allen, West Virginia State Coll., Institute
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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