Western Art

by Debora Greger

In her seventh book of poetry, Debora Greger walks out of art history class and into Europe, even to the edge of Asia. A night wedding in Venice, an encounter with a girl on an aqueduct in Istanbul, a walk into the emptiness of the Florida prairie, standing before a Rembrant or a tomb in Ravenna-these portraits of travel reveal a poet never at home even when home. Debora Greger's poems love the accident of discovery; she is a poet whose intimacies are expressed in whispers, whose secrets come in sidelong glances.

128 pages, Paperback

First published September 28, 2004

About the author

Debora Greger (b. 1949) is an American poet and visual artist.

Greger was raised in Richland, Washington. She attended the University of Washington and then the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Greger then went on to hold fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She was professor of English and creative writing at the University of Florida until retiring. Greger now works as Poet-in-Residence at the Harn Museum of Art.

Greger has published numerous books of poetry, including Men, Women, and Ghosts (2008), and her work has been included in issues of Best American Poetry . As a reviewer for Publishers Weekly observed, Greger “rarely rejoices, though she can surely console; her pruned-back, autumnal sensibility and her balanced lines suit the scenes she portrays.” Her poetry has been included in six volumes of The Best American Poetry and she has exhibited her artwork at several galleries and museums across the country. She also has a poem on Poetry 180 in number 42. Her work appeared in Paris Review, The Nation, Poetry, and The New Criterion.

Debora Greger lives in Gainesville, Florida and Cambridge, England with her life-partner, the poet and critic, William Logan.

Reviews

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Greger is not shy about her unbelief in these poems, but this unbelief must be wrestled with when confronting the art of Western culture with it's physical representation of belief and faith. These poems are an interesting encounter of the religion of the past with the secular of the culture of today.

[Angela · Rating 1 out of 5]

Greger's poetry seems utterly soulless and there are too many annoying little things about this collection. I know this is petty but the book is ugly. I can't recall the last time I've been distracted by horrendous typeface. I also don't care for the way that Greger spaces many of her poems, and I really, really, really hate how many epigraphs she uses. The collection as a whole has an epigraph, each of the five sections has an epigraph, and a lot of poems have an epigraph. She uses lines from Ovid, Keats, Milton, Lord Byron, Baudelaire, Turgenev, Eliot, Twain, and more! Perhaps the collection is meant as an homage to the Western canon, but her over-reliance on the greats of literature make her seem insecure...and there is a very noticeable difference in the quality of the quotes and of her poetry, so it's not like she's doing herself a favour.

I went through this collection in a bit of a daze. Nothing about her work grabbed me. Her imagery isn't compelling and is often repetitive—palaces, pigeons, Virgin Mary, vultures, saints, angels, and alligators!—and some of her poems are just bad. Like "The Mosaic of Creation," a three-part retelling of Genesis using rhyming couplets, with rhymes so forced and amateurish that it reads like a poem intended for children.

A lot of her poems have similar settings, which might have been okay if I enjoyed her writing, but the end result is more like reading a boring journal from a traveller who visits Venice, Istanbul, and Florida. The section about Turkey was laughably Orientalist, with mentions of djinns, golden trinkets, harem girls, and exotic street merchants. Okay, okay, Orientalism was a part of Western Art, but Greger barely scratches the surface of it. There is no critique or even a decent description of it, more like she is relying on the reader's belief that this place is so otherworldly fascinating instead of writing in a way that inspires awe.

Poems that I liked:
"Amy in the Afterworld," "Eurydice in Istanbul," "A Walk in the Unconscious."

=3/36 (8.3%) poems that I liked. (Wow. It seemed like there were way more than 36 poems to plod through, but there are quite a few multi-part poems. Really, 8.3% of the collection being likeable seems like waaay too high of a number).

[D. Thompson · Rating 5 out of 5]

As in all Gregor's works this book is exceptional. The mind takes a voyage through a sort of genesis in words. A great read. Use it in your poetry group.