Product Description

The poems gathered here range from sardonic musings on the American obsession with money to a chilling dramatic monologue by a convicted sex offender. Oates is at the height of her powers here.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2079167 in Books
• Published on: 1996-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 91 pages

From Publishers Weekly
This is Oates's eighth volume of poetry, yet her voice still lacks the readily identifiable features that make her one of America's most distinguished novelists. Her narrative poems are particularly prosaic, posing the question as to why Oates didn't write such poems as stories. Many of the best pieces recall the adolescent girl of the 1950s, mixing concrete memories?a family car ride ("Flirtation, July 1953"), the edgy teen-aged boy in "Sexy," the boy with his car, crayons?with less specific reflections on a sleepwalking child or impressions of the funeral of an infant cousin. The first two sections reflect and expand the volume's title, with an ironic hint of violence that pops up, for example, when a grandfather dangles the toddler over an open well. As autobiography recedes, so do craft and subject. Violence is more predominant: "He slammed me then I slammed him./ To turn the other cheek was great." There are some gems here, principally in the first two sections; other poems are banal.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Critics have given limited praise to Joyce Carol Oates's seven volumes of poems, perhaps because she doesn't treat poetry seriously enough for them. Her eighth collection will again disappoint those requiring formal, unflawed poetic craft. Oates transforms an album of painful dreams of childhood in upstate New York and "smokestacks, trashed autohulks, great American/ diesels" into a metaphor for "what we haven't known we've lost" in corporate, "wasted" society. Contemporary as street conversation, vivid as D.H. Lawrence (The Hostile Sun, her 1973 study of Lawrence, can be used as a guide to her work), she affirms Lawrence's "sweet acts of tenderness." Oates's best effects come from empathy for individual effort to achieve emotional wholeness. Tenderness is original, perceptive, and intensely personal. For all poetry readers.?Frank Allen, North Hampton Community Coll., Tannersville, Pa.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
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American Holiday
Ballad Of Ashfield Avenue
The Black Glove: A Rapture
The Bullfrogs
Burning Oak, November
Child Walking In Sleep
Dakota Mystery, 10 May 1994
Elegy: The Ancestors
Flash Flood
Flirtation, July, 1953
Frequent Flier I
Frequent Flier Ii
Glimpsed From A Car, Quickly Passing
Hands, Prints, Time: A Collage
He Was Talking About His Friend
Hermit Crab
I Am Krishna, Destroyer Of Worlds
Immobility Defense
In Blue Nantucket
In The Country Of The Blue
The Infant's Wake
Insomnia (2)
The Insomniac
Island, 1949
Like Walking To The Drug Store, When I Get Out
The Lord Is My Shepherd I Shall Not Want
Lost Creek
Marsena Sportsmen's Club, 1957
Motive, Metaphor
Nightmare, So Sweet
Nostalgia
O Crayola!
Off-season
Old Concord Cemetery
On This Morning Of Grief
Once Upon A Time
Orion
Prenatal
Recollection, In Tranquility
Recurring Dream Of Childhood
The Riddle
Rise Up, O Men Of God
Sexy
Snapshot Album
The Stone Well
Such Beauty!
Summer Squall, Monhegan Island
Tenderness
There Was A Shot
The Thin Rain
To An Aged Cat Dying In My Arms
The Triumph Of Gravity
Undertow, Wolf's Head Lake
Upstairs
What Is Most American Is Most In Motion!
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

Customer Reviews

I love JCO, but...
Joyce Carol Oates, Tenderness (Ontario Review Press, 1996)

While I'm a huge fan of Joyce Carol Oates' prose-- Cybele alone would have me singing her praises as one of America's finest living novelists, the rest is icing-- I've never been all that enamored with her poetry. Tenderness is an improvement over the volumes I've read to date, but honestly, not much of one. Every once in a while, she turns a good phrase or catches a really fine metaphor, but there's still a somewhat distressing lack of subtlety here, and when what little there is flies out the window, sometimes the resulting work is just painful to read:

"It's an ordinary morning & an ordinary flight, even in my new skin that's a fact I must acknowledge!
I've been here before, I meet myself returning swaying from the lavatory, I avoid my eyes!
Through the pressurized cabin waft the usual psittacosis viruses, Bacillus leprae, airborne TB!
Belted snug in Seat 2B my faceless companion reads Forbes,
I am belted snug at 30,000 feat reading Scientific American!
Must mark off universe into units of a certain length I am reading!
Infinity with a geometric figure I am reading!"
("Frequent Flier II")

Ouch. Three pages of this. (And, yes, every line that does not end with a question mark ends with an exclamation point. It's Tappy Tibbons afraid of flying.)

I rush to point out that most of the book is not this bad. It's not great, mind you, but this, I suspect, is a nadir for Joyce Carol Oates writing in any form. The strongest pieces ("Like Walking to a Drug Store, When I Get Out"), not surprisingly, are those where she returns to the same ground she covers in her strongest novels--getting inside the heads of the damaged, the twisted. Unfortunately, there are far too few pieces of this ilk here; I suggest grabbing this from the library and reading them, rather than adding this to your collection. **