4:30 Movie: Poems

by Donna Masini

In highly charged, dazzling language, 4:30 Movie explores a sister’s death and the ways movies shape our imaginations. In poems that are by turns intimate and wild, provocative and tender, award-winning poet Donna Masini explores personal loss, global violence, and the consolations of art. She brings her wit, grief, fury, and propulsive energy to bear on the preoccupations of our daily lives and our attempts to bargain with endings of every kind. Equal parts lament and praise, 4:30 Movie is fueled by despair and humor, governed by the ways in which movies enter our imaginations and frame our experiences. The movie theater becomes a presiding metaphor: part waiting room, part childhood, part underground depths where the self is a bit player, riding the subway with “its engine of extras.” Masini's exquisite wordplay shows the mind wrestling ferociously to forestall grief, as if finding the right words might somehow allow us to extend our beautiful, foreshortened run.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Hardcover

Published May 29, 2018

Reviews

[meggggg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Notes (I am reading this so I can produce a stronger personal statement for Hunter College):

-Extend beyond the self; patience; listening; receptive to sound, wordplay
-Poetry as chronicle; poetry of witness
-Grief, loss
-Form, format
-Found language (scripts, subway adverts)
-Semicolon motif (connecting, separating)
-"Deleted scene" interludes
-Questioning of Catholic faith; religion as source of anxiety rather than respite
-Movies = life we could live, but don't
-Being watched/watching; "gaze"
-Perceiving the self; watched vs. seen
-"Extras" as people unable to catalyze major action in plot of movie; passersby/bystanders
-Lists/documenting
-Prayer vs. worry: is there a difference?
-Girlhood/childhood; shared memories
-Masini recycles language and images in "Water Lilies" series in order to create a sense of cycle; there is "no escape" from feelings of inadequacy/no control
-Children and babies = new life; vs. sister's death
-Birds as spiritual "signposts"
-Sisters
-Plathian language in some places

[EL]

impressions
- anxiety ab representing the dearly departed
- one of the most satisfying title drops i have experienced
- claustrophobic (anagrams, combinations instead of infinity)
- poetry is a stream in the universe / sometimes donna masini is tapped into it

marked
- water lilies
- woman on cell phone dragging an empty cart through washington square park
- my child
- the blob
- washing her hair
- "nothing is static in a tatami shot" (elegy for church-key)
- "me opposite, her anagram, / more rearrangement than mirror" (marginalia)

thoughts
- nature of the claustrophobia - feeling like you're left stuck in a world without the dead
- tatami shot - movies force angle

[Victoria · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel I can never properly review / rate poetry. I look too much for the concrete, the easy to see. I don’t have the experience with poetry that I do with fiction. I think Donna Masini does many wonderful things with language and physical space in these poems, and there are some that I felt gut-punched by because of the emotion and how I could relate to them, but there were others that I scratched my head at.

[F.M Papaz · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautiful ode to Masini's sister and their relationship across life, through nostalgic transportations and honest depictions of cancer treatment and sadly degradation. Masini does not shy away from telling all that is painful, truthful, loving and unloving. The Water Lillies series was especially stirring and one to return to for inspiration if you're a poet.

[Melissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book, like Donna herself, is a gift.

[Courtney LeBlanc · Rating 4 out of 5]

I recently read Masini's collection of poetry, Turning to Fiction, and absolutely loved it so I came into this book with high expectations. Unfortunately for me it didn't live up to it. The poems focus on her sister's battle with, and ultimate death due to, cancer -- yet despite this extremely emotional topic, I didn't feel emotionally connected to these poems.

from Deleted Scene: Last Day: "I hear a book being written, my sister says, or is it a poem? / Her eyes are closed. / It has a lot of semicolons. // One sentence or two? she wants to know. Comma? Period? / Well, I say, semicolons join and separate."

from The Extra: "Now she's practicing seeing death everywhere-- ....// Her script says it is absolutely certain we are to die, and that she is / supposed to believe this."