Reviews

More than 20 years of writing and several volumes of previously published poetry are presented in Broumas's latest volume. Her poems flow in easy, natural rhythms, allowing myriad details to fall together in harmonious company. Broumas offers a new perspective on myths and fairy tales as well as a persistent theme of sisterhood. Her version of the Cinderella story has Cinderella abandoning her new privileges and rejoining her sister, and poems like "Demeter" and "Beauty and the Beast" encourage the idea that women need not walk in glass slippers or endure suffering at the hands of men. A practitioner of bodywork healing techniques, Broumas brings a physical awareness to the poetic form, and the celebration of the female body and sensual pleasures find safe haven in her words. Broumas (Beginning with O) has received many honors, including the Yale Younger Poets Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Recommended for larger public and academic libraries and special poetry collections.ÄAnn K. van Buren, New York Univ. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Throughout this hefty selection from a quarter-century's work, Broumas stays loyal to materials, themes and scenes that marked her Yale Younger Poets' Prize-winning collection of 1977: female figures from Greek mythology and European fairy tales, contemporary women loving women, light-filled landscapes, horror-filled history, meals that offer communion and promise community. Broumas grew up in Greece, with Greek as her first language. RaveÄthe title suggests rites at once pre- and postmodernÄbrings together poems from five books Broumas wrote alone, two sets of collaborations and a prose statement ("Moon," about her influences and aspirations). Many of the earlier poems recall reams of small "i"-driven magazine verse, pushed on by an insistent eros ("some weird mutation of orgasm/ a spasm"), but often lit by stand-out images, as in the stammered "Foreigner": "Down is stove and the stack of logs/ Up is bed and the climate the tropical." Abstractions can turn the work prosy, and politics can emerge as mere assertion, but at her best Broumas is learned and adventurous. "Days of Argument & Blossom" ends part II of the recent Perpetua: "Earth on a new eve, no lover/ no later that won't echo as refrain.... Stubborn and generous/ about our pleasure let us be as we,/ unaccountably happy here,/ escape the wait to hear the spit/ fall on the scythe of hours." Such lines head straight for the big questions, without looking back. (June) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.