What do you think?
Rate this book
Icarus Sees His Father Fly
Book by O'Donnell, John
72 pages, Paperback
First published August 15, 2004
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
August 18, 2019
Somewhere around the sestina about football, the issue with this collection cemented: there is far too much poetry here.
Which is maybe a weird argument to make AGAINST a poetry collection, and certainly one not everyone will see as a negative, but it comes down to this: this collection is super writerly, very poetic, full of some lovely smart language, but frequently that is all that is there. To have a collection which follows the incredibly rigid format of a sestina quickly up in a couple poems with a slightly more forgiving and looser villanelle feels deeply like an exercise in poetics, especially when you have such a mundane, nonpoetic topic as football to treat.
And sport comes up multiple times as a topic here (after the sestina, there is one on listening to the game on the radio, an ending note on golf). Others treat with the same poetics such moments as school days or being on the sea. The topics are often very specific, as if O'Donnell set out to say "today, I want to write about a mattress sales floor," and then set about writing that poem. Many of these poems are about these very specific experiences, honed down and clear. For me, it frequently feels like work that would be better suited in prose as part of a larger work.
This isn't to say that good writing isn't worth reading, of course, and for folks who read poetry for the wordplay and language and eschew meaning, you are probably the exact audience the book expects. And the language is frequently lovely, whether the rhyme scheme in the titular poem and the slant rhymes of each stanza in "Butterflies," subtle enough at first that you don't immediately even notice it in the language, or just lovely work like "The Last Wolf in Ireland". Even pieces where that heavy handed concept comes in are still lovely at times... the aforementioned "Showrooms" is no less attractive for its unconventional topic... but it also underscores some of the difficulties. For example, "Kindertotenlieder" and "The Loss" seem to be kindred poems (and both standouts to me), but the former seems stronger despite far simpler language and sparser images, despite "The Loss" being more clearly personal and beautifully worded. Perhaps it is because of how loss had been at the center of multiple poems in a row in this last section, making the contents feel like a litany of losses, an individual poem commemorating each loss ever felt, to the point of feeling more like obsession than tribute.
So really, three stars is very much about what I wanted from this, but I think a fan of "poetry" from a literary primer standpoint would be at home here. I think folks for whom poetry is a wise professor playing with fancy words would enjoy it quite a bit. There is absolutely a place for such poetry. But this particular collection didnt get there for me, particularly because of those qualities that others might praise (and really, may that praise come if there are others who loved this).
Which is maybe a weird argument to make AGAINST a poetry collection, and certainly one not everyone will see as a negative, but it comes down to this: this collection is super writerly, very poetic, full of some lovely smart language, but frequently that is all that is there. To have a collection which follows the incredibly rigid format of a sestina quickly up in a couple poems with a slightly more forgiving and looser villanelle feels deeply like an exercise in poetics, especially when you have such a mundane, nonpoetic topic as football to treat.
And sport comes up multiple times as a topic here (after the sestina, there is one on listening to the game on the radio, an ending note on golf). Others treat with the same poetics such moments as school days or being on the sea. The topics are often very specific, as if O'Donnell set out to say "today, I want to write about a mattress sales floor," and then set about writing that poem. Many of these poems are about these very specific experiences, honed down and clear. For me, it frequently feels like work that would be better suited in prose as part of a larger work.
This isn't to say that good writing isn't worth reading, of course, and for folks who read poetry for the wordplay and language and eschew meaning, you are probably the exact audience the book expects. And the language is frequently lovely, whether the rhyme scheme in the titular poem and the slant rhymes of each stanza in "Butterflies," subtle enough at first that you don't immediately even notice it in the language, or just lovely work like "The Last Wolf in Ireland". Even pieces where that heavy handed concept comes in are still lovely at times... the aforementioned "Showrooms" is no less attractive for its unconventional topic... but it also underscores some of the difficulties. For example, "Kindertotenlieder" and "The Loss" seem to be kindred poems (and both standouts to me), but the former seems stronger despite far simpler language and sparser images, despite "The Loss" being more clearly personal and beautifully worded. Perhaps it is because of how loss had been at the center of multiple poems in a row in this last section, making the contents feel like a litany of losses, an individual poem commemorating each loss ever felt, to the point of feeling more like obsession than tribute.
So really, three stars is very much about what I wanted from this, but I think a fan of "poetry" from a literary primer standpoint would be at home here. I think folks for whom poetry is a wise professor playing with fancy words would enjoy it quite a bit. There is absolutely a place for such poetry. But this particular collection didnt get there for me, particularly because of those qualities that others might praise (and really, may that praise come if there are others who loved this).
Displaying 1 of 1 review