Wise Poison

by David Rivard

In Wise Poison David Rivard gives us a mind hard at work on the most vital Who am I? What do I love? What can be trusted? At issue in these passionate arguments with the self are the "curious forces" that surround us in every part of our lives. In an airport lounge in the Yucatán, in the song of a street musician, or simply in the pulsing of skin along the neck, Rivard finds connections and doubt, and reason for both comfort and rage.

Genres: Poetry

74 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

David Rivard is the author of Bewitched Playground, Wise Poison, which won the James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets, and Torque. He teaches at Tufts University and in the M.F.A. Writing Program at Vermont College. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "

Reviews

[SmarterLilac · Rating 5 out of 5]

My new favorite book of poems for this year. So excellent. The poems are somehow both lingering and concise. In dealing with topics as varied as relationships, addiction, recovery (or lack thereof) and faith, the author strikes a nice balance between the personal and the universal.

[Jeff Schwartz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this a long time ago & recently rediscovered it. Now I want to read all of Rivard's poems.

[Tristan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wise Poison was a pleasant and generally pretty good collection of poems. In terms of topic, they were fairly typical poems of life as one might live it, inflected in places with tones of religion and mystical experience. I found most of the poems to be solid in execution and interesting in idea, but not stellar in either aspect, although there were some sections where I thought line breaks were employed with unusual degrees of effectiveness and thought, like "For one thing I'm glad / the goal of enlightenment is being stupid / enough to slip out the door" or "I've died enough by now I trust / just what's imperfect or ruined".
On the whole, I liked the poems of section three better than the rest of the book. The poems here were the ones with the greatest degree of magic--both verbal (for me) and literal--in pieces like "God the Broken Lock", "Earth to Tell of the Beasts" "C'Ee Un'Altra Possibilita" (sorry for the lack of diacritics), "Jihad" and "Fado". I did also very much enjoy "Big Mood Swing", "Version Tuscon", "Document Processing", and "Against Gravity", but none of those held up to my favorite pieces in section three. I think my very favorite poem might have been "Jihad", which opens:

I love the drops of rain that stammer down the fire escape,
the second cousins of history, as slyly incestuous as all second cousins.
Joe Reth lives below, a commercial sign painter,
wife & two boys, the entire family of Reth
hunkers down there
and hangs on to each day
as a stuttererer might to a frothing, seductively multisyllabic
concoction. Non, non, they aren't history,
neither the first fragrant days of the planet
nor the last of collapsing stone.

Later in the poem, the mystical elements are drawn even further--"The wind won't celebrate your great jihads. // But I love how the wind cries Mary, / so for me there may always be a small room"--although it never becomes obtrusive. I think that he could play up the moments of sparkle and certainly of mystic influence further without obtrusiveness or detraction from sense, but I suppose better too little than too much.
A good enough collection, especially if you are looking for poems that are not in a gnomic mode, in which case, the fluidity and intelligence of the verse might make it a great one.

[Patricia Murphy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted some inspiration, and I found it here, although there were a few moments I wanted to re-write. This seemed due to trends. This reads like a book from 1996. Some high points for me:

"the tragic can go fuck itself."

"An impersonator of the helpful"

"In the praxis of attainables."

"I have forgotten the struggle between anguish and anguish."

"I'm drawn to the porch by a ripsaw's
E-flat run through plywood."

"The wind won't celebrate your great jihads."

[Mills College Library]

811.54 R618w 1996