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The Choreography of Desire (Rainbow $17.95)
In The Choreography of Desire (Rainbow $17.95), Diana Hayes seeks to explore the links between visual imagery and print, using the interplay of poetic text and photographs. Some of the photographs, though stagy, have a haunting quality, less sensual than surreal. If the poems strike me as not entirely successful, products of the world of fancy, rather than the burning, transformative world of the imagination, it may be because they are too cerebral.
A potentially fine poem, "Dancing the New Moon, New Year's Eve,"; celebrates to considerable effect our animal vitality, the ground-swell of sex that drives us; but it is hindered by a too-rational syntax and certain clichéd figures of speech-";Eyes like mercury,"; "star-drenched sky,"; and "world of flesh.";
As a result, we are not drawn into the erotic moment, but pulled back and asked to admire the poet's verbal cleverness. Although the poems would benefit from being more playful and dramatic and less self-explanatory, there's still something very appealing about Hayes's aims here, and the consciousness at work in the poems.
1-55056-638-5
by Gary Geddes
[BCBW SUMMER 1999]
A potentially fine poem, "Dancing the New Moon, New Year's Eve,"; celebrates to considerable effect our animal vitality, the ground-swell of sex that drives us; but it is hindered by a too-rational syntax and certain clichéd figures of speech-";Eyes like mercury,"; "star-drenched sky,"; and "world of flesh.";
As a result, we are not drawn into the erotic moment, but pulled back and asked to admire the poet's verbal cleverness. Although the poems would benefit from being more playful and dramatic and less self-explanatory, there's still something very appealing about Hayes's aims here, and the consciousness at work in the poems.
1-55056-638-5
by Gary Geddes
[BCBW SUMMER 1999]
Submitted on July 9, 2003 in By David.
