Bewitched Playground

by David Rivard

A kind of "public dreaming" takes place via the music of these poems--a music as likely to visit the long-dead ghosts of the Kwakiutl tribe as Gianni Versace, and as interested in the baby seat of a car as it is in a boxing ring. Building on the critical success of David Rivard's two earlier, award-winning books, Bewitched Playground widens both his emotional aperture and formal range. Rivard calls it "my book of domestic voodoo"--not a book about having a child, but written out of a life touched by a new intimacy, and tuned-in to an unwilled strangeness, a fluctuating gravity. Here, the unconscious forces of the imagination intersect with the everyday, in a crossroads at the bewitched playground. These stylistically innovative poems are full of the rediscovery that the world teems with "otherness," with freshness and surprise.

Genres: Poetry

66 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2000

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

[Patrick Duggan · Rating 4 out of 5]

David Rivards's poems are wonderful dances between humor and sincerity, stark Emersonian observation, and tongue in cheek Schuyleresque introspection. He transforms the actual world into sign and symbol of itself. A woman or lamp is there in literal fact, but also sign for hundreds of different impressions and connotations. His thoughts are clear extended breaths, wrapping across several lines and waterfalling down the page, yet never meandering.

Bewitched Playground is a wonderfully American collection of verse. Rivard speaks to fatherhood, to Bob Dylan, to eulogy, to Sears and bottled water, to dozens of people in dozens of cultural settings, to the American landscape as it moves through the seasons. His voice is constant and quick, even as he moves across form and stanza, altering line structure and playing with modes. There is politic within the book, but it is subtextual, tied into indoor pools, boxing rings, and the scattering of children's bath toys.

Rivard may be guilty of occasionally dipping into sap or extended rhetoric, but who among us hasn't? Within the context of a northeastern poetics of fatherhood, it is seamless and funny. A quip about his wife's bumper sticker in one poem gives way to a philosophical extraction of Jung and gender the next. Rivard is Bruce Springstein at his best, and Frank O'Hara at his brightest. Rivard is the poet's cool uncle who plays guitar and seems to know something the other uncles don't, but he's not all smug about it.