This is Jacket 12, July 2000 | # 12 Contents | Homepage | Catalog | |
Tom Clark
reviews Rachel Loden’s Hotel Imperium
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The complication (and beauty) of Loden’s writerly comic procedure is all in the nuances and gestures of meaning conveyed by particular word-choices, tones and implications. Carefully angled and modulated, her mini-narratives are clean-hewn and economical throughout yet generously elaborated at all the right moments. This is the new socialist brain. This is the statue
Boldly invading territories where most ‘art’ poets seem to fear to tread, Loden exploits history, politics and mainline pop-cultural iconography for her central subject matter. With subtle skill, she deploys this subject matter to express displaced concerns, tricking out of its shopworn contents attitudes and urgencies that are very much of the moment. Sexuality, self-esteem, and other contemporary areas of exposure are revealed as the subject matter-within-the-subject matter. If I have but one life, let me live it. Loden’s poetic forte is a clever, subversive conversion of the clichéd figurations of kitsch into the starkly-lit truths of critical history. She approaches those tarnished presences with special care, disinters, dusts, polishes, re-enlivens, energetically embodies them, as though they were the only myths we’ve got. This is the man we love, Retro-set in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties, Hollywood, the White House and the Soviet Union, among other legendary periods and venues, these small, spare melodramas of a generic epoch negotiate their wry, edgy intimations and insinuations with a cool detachment that ironically undermines their fond surface sentiments, their halfhearted attempts at a coy nostalgia. A calculated ambivalence in the way the poems come out leaves us contemplating them with many open questions dangling in our minds. It seems that something red as love Shelley thought poets should be recognized as unacknowledged legislators — an oxymoronic thought that riddles all attempts at the poet- as- social- spokesperson role. But whether their observations are listened to or not, keen-eyed poets have long supplied our most particularized point of view of things. Good poems can still offer the best kind of culture-criticism, as Rachel Loden’s do — articulating vividly our deep and simple responses to the images and icons by which history will define us. |
The publisher, University of Georgia Press, has a website at http://www.uga.edu/ugapress/. The book is available from Amazon and other bookstores (see Jacket’s bookstore pages), and you can visit Rachel Loden’s own webpage, which lists various purchase options: http://www.thepomegranate.com/loden/hotel.html |
Jacket 12 Contents page |