Get Pity The Bathtub Its Forced Embrace Of The Human Form Translated By Matthea Harvey Readable In Paperback

is just not my kind of poetry, It is surely somebody's kind because Matthea Harvey is a contemporary poet who is highly heralded, Beloved's not too strong a word at this point,

So my one star is because I don't like how she approaches poetry, her style, her leanings when dealing with language, enjambments playing double duty so that the first word in the line has to be repeated in order to make the next line work so that the two lines make sense as your reading.
It feels pretentious it feels like someone

writing poetry to sound and feel like poetry it feels like a workshop gimmick.
What it should feel like is a sharp gash of words that escaped from a heart somewhere familiar and beautiful and scary and perfectly mysterious.
There should be flesh and song and a living thing full of electricity and hot circulation, It should take the top of your head off, like Em said all those years ago, A couple of things that I don't personally care for in poetry:

, seemingly impenetrable walls of text, Though I do like a longer, meandering line break system sometimes, I am not a fan of bricks of text that is, not unless it is prose poetry.


. Lack of punctuation. This, I'm just not a fan of in any way, I realize that it can be used for many different purposes,

These both greeted me while reading this collection, Those gripes aside, I still found much to like about this collection, . .

I loved the long Ceiling Unlimited Series, I liked Frederick Courteney Selous's Letters To His Love, I enjoyed the series of Self Portraits,

In general, I liked the playful language though I often felt like I wasn't 'getting' some sort of humor in places.
. I liked the subtle and sometimes not so subtle questioning,

I want to say that I loved the book There was just too much that I didn't like, though.

This is a somewhat difficult book of poetry to go though simply because of the stylistic approach Harvey takes.
Most of her poems have sentences that blend into each other, as the word that completes a previous sentence is used to begin a new sentence.
Reading the poems can leave the meaning a little disjointed if you lose your place reading them aloud sometimes doesn't help because you don't know where to stop to catch a breath.
But Harvey's fantastical ideas still shine through in this collection, so I ended up enjoying it,

I like how Harvey can take one completely unrealistic idea and roll with it, turning it into an entire poem.
She never states her idea for the reader outright, skirting around the unconventional thought like it's a normal aspect of our lives and waiting for us to figure out what's different in the world of these characters.
She creates different figures and stories within her poetry, which I really enjoyed,

I think that a lot of people will like these poems, if they take the time to sit with them for a while.
This is poetry that you can't read quickly it demands to be held at arm's length and read a few times until you understand the general meaning.
Then it needs to be analyzed even further, While this isn't a bad thing, it means that Harvey's collection may be overlooked as people search for poetry that is an easier and faster read.
Where ekphrasis is a happy excuse for the long plight of the nonsequitur imaginings, Lyrical, longlined, pushing, pushing, a progression not seen often in poetry but rather fiction, It's a reminder for poets to ask themselves, "Am I reining in the natural lyrical, lengthy progression of my Muse's hand" Here's an example of being clearly imaginative and trusting the strange hand that guides you onward, regardless of the constraints of the painting that prompted you to the paper's stark whiteness.
Though I believe what Ezra Pound said: “The poet must never infringe upon the painter's function the picture must exist around the words the words must not attempt too far to play at being brush strokes”Matthea Harvey did well enough there was not much, for me to question.
For most part, she could convey the subtlety of her subjectivity, and the linguistic innovations, though wellcrafted, were at times, a mismatch to the rhythm and cadence yearned by the ear.
Nevertheless, some passages shone with musicality and meaning, and boy, how Harvey at least, saved herself from the asymmetry between her desire and poetics.
i have been wanting to read this book forever, . . the title has haunted me for years now!
I can mock the debonair pose of hand on hip,
casual grip of cigarette stub, but I only masked the body.

It was the one time I asked myself, truly,
what face I saw in the mirror, then answered
with a storm of brushstrokes on my forehead,
a shadow lapping my eye with its dark tongue,
misery marking my mouth.
One is not the same
after such clarity, You liked my stance. Said if I
were a stranger leaning on a wall at a party you would
ask me to dance, would rashly press against me.

I did not point out the small glowing ash, After all,
in a dream sequence your taffeta would not burn, Matthea Harvey is one of those spectacularly gifted writers who can manipulate the English language so dexterously that I find myself more often amazed with her technical prowess than the content of the poems themselves although that is often fantastic as well.
I find myself especially drawn to the poems where the first word of a line finishes the thought of the preceding line, but starts a completely new idea for the line it begins.
I'm sure there must be a technical poetic term for this exercise, but I don't know what it is, Example:
"At their hems that seem to map out coastlines left far
Behind the new songs are the old absurd hopes.
. .
Read it. This poet is incredibly talented, Matthea Harvey isn't the blushing poet shyly sliding handwritten poems in pure, handwritten manuscript across the table at you, And we should all be glad about that, Her blocky forms and shuddering rhythms "Liked it because his barks got better reactions amp it was / Easier to sneak up on the servants amp steal bits of their / Dinner was always served at seven amp though she hid her / Lovers in cupboards amp made them tiptoe past the trellises / They never lasted long because.
. . " hide their own seductive, coy logic, an associative pattern that's more honestly human among all these machinetyped, inhumanly compressed shapes than many a poetic scrawl in cheerful ballad stanzas.
The pattern fits her subjects, as well: close, dysfunctional, straightjacketed relationships, sometimes terrifically onesided, as in the gorgeous "Frederick Courteney Selous's Letters to His Love", and sometimes pushing against the disappearing human and the doubleness of identity in artistic creation, as in the ekphrastic "SelfPortraits: After Paintings by sitelinkMax Beckmann".
Here's the first one in that sequence, "Double Portrait, Carnival,":

I worked on us
for weeks, Painted my face, then yours, I loved yours,
made it smile as our doubles struck silly poses,
Me the hapless clown, you both general and horse
the forelegs your legs, the hind legs, horse,
high heels mimicking hooves.
I gave you a huge hat,
a soft grey jacket, a white cravat, closed your fingers
around the reins.
And for myself I painted a cigarette,
a purple suit and shiftless feet, I thought I was painting you
a poem of color, of spotted horses and orange cuffs,
But the horse had a wild eye, the tent flap gaped,
and we stood there in disguise,

Carnival Double Portrait Max Beckmann and Quappi

In each poem, like in each of Beckmann's paintings, identity's fractures make for great poetic play.
And those notes of melancholic failure Exquisitely placed, following the charm of wistful ambition: "I thought I was painting you / a poem of color".
Incidentally, if anyone is rehabilitating the enjambed line, signature to poetry qua poetry, that person is Matthea Harvey.
Why ask for more It's only her first book of poems, Matthea Harvey, Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form Alice James Books,

My crush on Matthea Harvey grows with each of her books I read.
Pity the Bathtub is her first collection, and it's incredible, There's so much wow factor here that I'm not sure quite where to begin, There are two basic types of poems here, so we'll start there, The first type takes enjambment to its absurdist conclusion this type of poem comprises about threequarters of the book, The only thing to which I can compare them is Claude Simon's unreadable novel Conducting Bodies, In prose, it was an awful experience to try and read Conducting Bodies is a single two hundred fiftysix page sentence that doesn't make one bloody bit of sense.
In poetry, however, and with Harvey adding such niceties as punctuation and imagery, it works fabulously:

“Pity the bathtub that belongs to the queen its feet
Are bronze casts of the former queen's feet its sheen
A sign of fretting is that an inferior stone shows through
Where the marble is worn away with industrious
Polishing the tub does not take long it is tiny some say
Because the queen does not want room for splashing.
. . ”
p., from the title track

Okay, that Apollinairian bit of grand guignol may have not been the best example of how she introduced punctuation into the form.
But just listen to the way those words bounce and rattle, every one of them dripping with context, That's crazy talk, right there,

The second type is more traditional, relying less on form and wordplay than on image and story, They're just as good, a shade less striking for obvious reasons but just as accomplished, and let's remember that this is a debut collection.


“Dear dustghost, the instructions don't make
sense unless I sing them, If the bottommost hem
is six feet from the ground, how do I get into this dress
Bird ode: dark triangle feet in a windfield.

Fifth Museum Poem: O swim on through, ”
p., from “Almost Anything”

I totally stole “the instructions don't make/sense unless I sing them” as a title for an upcoming XTerminal track.
Not sure I can give you a more strident recommendation than that, I have loved, loved, loved every book of Matthea Harvey's I have read so farand this is the best of the lot.
½
.