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Poetry Collections
by Gillian Conoley
Woman Speaking Inside
Film Noir
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Some Gangster Pain
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Tall Stranger
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Beckon
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Lovers in the Used World /
Profane Halo
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Gillian Conoley -- born in
1955 in Taylor, Texas, where she grew
up, -- has since lived in Massachusetts,
Madrid, and New Orleans. Her poems have
appeared in the The American Poetry
Review, Ploughshares, The
North American Review, and numerous
other magazines around the country.
Conoley taught at the University of New
Orleans. Some Gangster Pain is
her first full-length collection of
poetry.
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Reviews
Some Gangster Pain
Panache, bravery, resilience: these are
Gillian Conoley's true colors. From the
invention of Texas, her native native,
to inventing a friend, she looks from a
glass-bottomed boat at the fabulous
underworld most of us overlook. If we go
along there's a chance we'll learn to
see through some gangster pain the
particular lives, not so much distorted
as transformed, made bearable,
beautiful, and finally her own.
—Madeline
DeFrees
It is
hard to give a sense, without quotin, of
what these powerfully compressed poems
are like. The words they are made of are
our durable everyday ones, but so
compacted, so impatient of syntax, that
haloes of strangeness and mystery are
generated around the short sentences,
which are sometimes abrupt as gunfire.
Emotions are coded in terms of what we
experience physically: of rustling nylon
and lipsticked cigarettes, of suicide
kings and one-eyed jacks, of strawberry
roan and appalousa, of the prickly wind
of Texas--never such things for their
own sake, but as keys to the secret
meanings of a passionate existence.
—John
Frederick Nims
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Reviews of Other Conoley Poetry
Collections
Tall Stranger:
Poems
This is a tidy collection of twenty-five
poems, all finely honed and rich with
the slowness of a dead afternoon. The
landscape is Texas, some farms, and a
town or two in Arkansas. The music is
country and western on a small dark
radio. The time is often the 1960s, and
if not the 1960s, then it's the small
town feel of the sixties, before the
world got ugly. Conoley writes about
family, place, and the everyday
heartache of not getting enough. Her
writing, in fact, is a lean version of
The Last Picture Sbow, where a juke box
is playing and Cokes are nursed.
Loneliness begins on porchsteps and ends
in seedy bars, where love is that man
with his elbows on a rickety table.
There is a deliberate attention to the
odd graces of her characters. Conoley
sums up her Aunt Alma and the homecoming
queen with the three "runner-ups." Her
people wear jeans and aprons, and when
they dance, dust is kicked up from
floorboards and there is a delightfully
honest twang in Conoley's poetry.
—Publisher
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Lovers in the Used World
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While
singularly up-to-date in
their topics gas stations,
stars, urban centers,
"deep-fried... catfish,"
"teenagers" who "xerox/
genitalia" the poems in
Conoley's fifth volume come
dangerously close to their
apparent model: Jorie
Graham's oeuvre. Beyond some
high-low pastiche, Conoley's
real subjects are those
Graham's style, on constant
display here, seems to
involuntarily bring forth;
the fragmentary phrases,
double-spaced long lines and
phrase-long
self-questionings here
result in abstract
speculations ("the almost
seen/ luminous circle
breaking to parenthesis")
that raise problems about
beauty, "system" and chaos,
embodiment and relation, God
and God's absence from the
phenomenal world. Alcibiades
and Socrates each get a
poem, or part of a poem, to
themselves. A few relatively
compact poems ("The
Masters," "Flute Girl") are
unqualified successes,
drawing out Conoley's own
uneasy sparkle and shine. |
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The rest of the book owes far too much
to Graham, whose mannerisms though
suited to Conoley's big topics overwhelm
what Conoley has to say. Graham's method
of interweaving everyday actions with
empty philosophical queries ("What if
there is not enough nothing?" writes
Conoley), her attractively scattered
sentence fragments, her stentorian
openings ("That the transactions would
end"), her domesticated jump-cuts and
even distinctive props from Graham's
most famous poems (birds on a phone
line, for example) pervade so many of
Conoley's new poems that this book is
best read as respectful homage. (May)
Forecast: Conoley's previous books,
including Beckon (1996) and Some
Gangster Pain (1987), both from
Carnegie-Mellon, are well-known and
well-respected on the po-biz circuit, as
is the magazine of which Conoley is
founder and editor, Volt.
Poet-in-residence and associate
professor at Sonoma State University,
Conoley should reach the school-based
readership that has been waiting for
this title.
—Publishers
Weekly
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Profane
Halo
Exuberant and challenging, the quick
cuts and vibrant, freestanding images in
Conoley's fifth volume let her see
America from many sides and in all sorts
of scales, from the ground level of
coastal suburbs to the grand cycles of
political history. "Dear Sunset that was
sun of now/ Near Greatness, dear tongue
my Queen dear rock solid," the title
poem asks, "how could we know that we
are forerunners?" There follows a series
of verbally brilliant, sometimes
strikingly fragmentary poems, some
perhaps inspired by photographs; Conoley
lights up American spaces and persons
past and present, embedding quotes from
poetic luminaries (Dickinson, Zukofsky)
and showing a slant toward the Pacific
coast, where "California floats its
prisons in the sea." Conoley (Beckon),
who teaches at Sonoma State, also runs
the hip poetry journal Volt; if her last
book took much (perhaps too much) from
Jorie Graham, this one recalls such
peers as Brenda Hillman and Claudia
Keelan. Though sometimes scattered, even
chaotic, Conoley's odes and dithyrambs
convey remarkable emotion, from joy
("ecstatic the sparrows/ in bursts in
trees/ above the Western American
fence") to whimsy to disorienting pain
("Night wounds, let me introduce you/ to
the day wounds"). This is a strong
mid-career book with plenty to recommend
itself in terms of condensed
macropolitics and felt regionalism. But
coming so soon after superficially
similar volumes from Keelan (The
Devotion Field) and Eleni Sikelianos
(The California Poem), Conoley's project
may not get the oxygen it needs.
—Publishers
Weekly |
