Natural Histories

Yale Series of Younger Poets

by Leslie Ullman

Winner of the 1978 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition.

"In her honest, quiet way, Ullman puts to poetic use the self-generating power that lies within her. No restraint is so permanent it cannot be cast off, no confinement so total release cannot be won. Her freedom is the ideal freedom of the poet, the mind going on, distilling, adding, converting, supplementing and complementing, certain of the real relationship of response to event no matter how remote or peripheral the events are or how ineffectual or unrelated the responses seem."-Richard Hugo

Genres: Poetry

68 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1979

Reviews

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Her poems remind me of those scenes in movies where a character is having a mental breakdown, recalling a series of images or snippets of past events and noticing small things - ticking clocks, dripping faucets - happening in the room around him at that moment until it all finally explodes, except with Ullman's poems there is no explosion: they simply end. Strongly imagist and subtly critical of society, for example "Health" which recounts the daily activities of a traditional husband and wife, ending with the husband falling soundly asleep next to his wife who's been stuck inside all day. Other favs are: Why There Are Children, Breakfast, Beyond Dreams, Ceremony and Dancing.