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Revolver
As restless, reckless, and precise as the Colt revolver for which it is named, Robyn Schiff’s Revolver “repeats fire without reloading” as it reckons with the array of foreboding objects displayed at the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the traces of their ghosts one hundred years later.
A dirge on the Singer Sewing Machine, an exuberant and unnerving rumination on multipurpose campaign furniture, and a breathless account of Ralph Lauren’s silver Porsche 550 Spyder are among the collection’s exhilarating corporate histories, urgent fantasias, and agonizing love poems. The long, lavish, and utterly unpredictable sentences that Schiff has assembled contort as much to discover what can’t be contained as what can.
This is a book of extremes relentlessly contemporary in scope. And like the eighty-blade sportsman’s knife also described here, Revolver keeps opening and reopening to the daunting possibilities of transformation—“Splayed it is a bouquet of all the ways a point mutates.”
from “Silverware by J. A. Henckels”
Let me be
as streamlined as my knife when I say this.
As cold as my three-pronged fork that
cools the meat even as it steadies it.
A pettiness in me was honed
in this cutlers’ town, later bombed,
in which Adolf Eichmann, who was born there
alongside my wedding pattern, could hear
the constant sharpening of knives
like some children hear the corn in their hometowns
talking to them through the wind.
The horizon is just the score they breathe through
like a box of chickens
breathing through a slit.
A dirge on the Singer Sewing Machine, an exuberant and unnerving rumination on multipurpose campaign furniture, and a breathless account of Ralph Lauren’s silver Porsche 550 Spyder are among the collection’s exhilarating corporate histories, urgent fantasias, and agonizing love poems. The long, lavish, and utterly unpredictable sentences that Schiff has assembled contort as much to discover what can’t be contained as what can.
This is a book of extremes relentlessly contemporary in scope. And like the eighty-blade sportsman’s knife also described here, Revolver keeps opening and reopening to the daunting possibilities of transformation—“Splayed it is a bouquet of all the ways a point mutates.”
from “Silverware by J. A. Henckels”
Let me be
as streamlined as my knife when I say this.
As cold as my three-pronged fork that
cools the meat even as it steadies it.
A pettiness in me was honed
in this cutlers’ town, later bombed,
in which Adolf Eichmann, who was born there
alongside my wedding pattern, could hear
the constant sharpening of knives
like some children hear the corn in their hometowns
talking to them through the wind.
The horizon is just the score they breathe through
like a box of chickens
breathing through a slit.
- GenresPoetry
84 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2008
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115 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
June 26, 2024
Robyn Schiff supremacy. I'm so lucky I got to take two of her classes.
February 28, 2009
For seventy five years Marianne Moore has been marginalized, misunderstood as the Scientist Poet, described as the thinker interested in “eternal verities” when in fact she mapped the flux of knowledge and knowing in a new, anti-Linnaean way that cognitive science only recently caught up to. A Moore poem about a buffalo provides a definition of “buffalo” that includes its scientific classification, its genetic relations, its economic uses, its role in the Buddha's life, past artistic representations, creatures like the cat and the igneous stone that have one or two physical features in common with a buffalo or the idea of buffalosity, and so on. For the space of a poem we see the buffalo as it exists in the human mind, with all the associations, sensical and non-, scientific and lyrical, that together constitute “buffalo” as we know it. Yet Moore had few followers – she cleared new stylistic and epistemological fields, but not many have settled or expanded them.
Then Robyn Schiff appeared with Worth, and then Revolver, in which she's mastered Moore’s style of moving easily between objects – sometimes based on associations and connections that are so minute that the move between a cake and the genius of the 16th-century colonial mind seems at first idiosyncratic. But the connections are there, and it takes the Schiffean mode of thinking that her books teach us to notice the minute but pivotal connections between Colt’s wedding cake, revolvers, waltzers, the production of sugar, sewing bees, housefly regurgitation, and so on. (This describes the first two stanzas, of thirteen, in “Colt Rapid Fire Revolver,” and it may explain why it’s difficult to quote individual phrases in a review of her work. The grammar, needless to say, is Miltonian fun: tortuous, not torturous.) Like Moore’s, Schiff’s readers learn to perceive relationships between objects not by synecdoche but by the grammar of the mind slipping from one to the next in poems whose only stability is imposed from outside – by division into stanzas that obey the same syllabic form. Maybe thought too is object-oriented and swivelly until enclosed by Platonic logic.
This isn’t to say that Schiff is the second coming of Moore: she steals what’s useful to her and adapts it to her own purposes. Schiff seems to be engaged not in creating a new totally-inclusive taxonomy but in describing the inseparability in one’s mind of a loved one, Ralph Lauren, an errand that needs doing, a Rolex Submarital Oyster, movies, and all the other details one engages with when one has time to “organize one’s thoughts.” Her images don’t add up to a whole – one could keep pivoting forever if one only wasn’t pressed by the next errand – yet the connections are true to the mind’s logic: detritus in a poem hasn’t felt less like detritus since O’Hara.
Then Robyn Schiff appeared with Worth, and then Revolver, in which she's mastered Moore’s style of moving easily between objects – sometimes based on associations and connections that are so minute that the move between a cake and the genius of the 16th-century colonial mind seems at first idiosyncratic. But the connections are there, and it takes the Schiffean mode of thinking that her books teach us to notice the minute but pivotal connections between Colt’s wedding cake, revolvers, waltzers, the production of sugar, sewing bees, housefly regurgitation, and so on. (This describes the first two stanzas, of thirteen, in “Colt Rapid Fire Revolver,” and it may explain why it’s difficult to quote individual phrases in a review of her work. The grammar, needless to say, is Miltonian fun: tortuous, not torturous.) Like Moore’s, Schiff’s readers learn to perceive relationships between objects not by synecdoche but by the grammar of the mind slipping from one to the next in poems whose only stability is imposed from outside – by division into stanzas that obey the same syllabic form. Maybe thought too is object-oriented and swivelly until enclosed by Platonic logic.
This isn’t to say that Schiff is the second coming of Moore: she steals what’s useful to her and adapts it to her own purposes. Schiff seems to be engaged not in creating a new totally-inclusive taxonomy but in describing the inseparability in one’s mind of a loved one, Ralph Lauren, an errand that needs doing, a Rolex Submarital Oyster, movies, and all the other details one engages with when one has time to “organize one’s thoughts.” Her images don’t add up to a whole – one could keep pivoting forever if one only wasn’t pressed by the next errand – yet the connections are true to the mind’s logic: detritus in a poem hasn’t felt less like detritus since O’Hara.
October 16, 2025
Overall, Schiff is a talented poet with a knack for imagery and the ability to delve into strange topics, like brands (the poems about Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein my personal favorites) with an ease that has the reader sipping her particular brand of koolaid. I found myself struggling to connect to every poem, though, and would fade in and out of step with her depending on what was on the page. For the most part, Schiff kept my attention and I deeply respect the way she plays with detail and line.
June 27, 2017
some of the turns may edge into melodrama from time to time, and the general motions of the poems (which are just Schiff's) i can see someone saying become stale, but i still think that Schiff's poetry is doing what a lot of contemporary poetry isn't, doing it well, and doing what Poetry does in particular as a form (which again a lot of contemporary poets don't seem to recognize at all)
October 26, 2022
I thought I could read this in two days, but I thought wrong!!! Incredibly long, dense poems that I couldn't always keep up with – lots of trivia and tricky associative leaps. Some really stunning moments though – I hope to come back to it sometime!
August 22, 2025
Hated the writing style at the beginning, then hated myself for hating the writing style at the end
October 13, 2008
The poems have a lot to admire, as there is a lot in them to admire. I enjoy the revolving form, where Schiff tumbles from one idea into the next, and into the next, and then back to one of the original ideas. Her way of doing it, which is so loose, feels accidental, and easy. I feel sometimes, though, the poems veer too far, that their ambition for variety pushes uncomfortably close to indulging moments irrelevant to the poem.
March 26, 2010
Robyn Schiff makes me hear/feel words like music. In her hands language is precious and tangible and as malleable and playful as play-doh - though certainly much more refined. There was one moment where a word repeated itself but only in sound somehow and I thought "Damn! I almost missed that! But then I didn't and wow." I will be re-reading this and when I do, I will come back and write down that little jewel of a phrase to share with you.
July 5, 2011
Though I admire the vast and unexpected ground covered in these poems, they, ultimately, gave me vertigo and nausea. The sprawling, jumpy lines--sentences that spanned two pages (ughhh)--were far too demanding and artificial. The form obstructed the marvelous content. This forced form, as well as the forced insertion of the author, made this work overly self-concious and wrought.
August 28, 2008
Really good, great in fact, "Multi-purpose Steamship Furniture, by Taylor & Sons" was a standout as was "Revolver". I really like Robyn Schiff's turns and surprising, but never angular, twists in place.
July 30, 2009
This is one of the best books of poetry published in the last few years. Schiff is smart, insightful, and such an amazing stylist. Her poems take you on surprising--almost reckless--rides at the end of which, upon arrival, you realize Schiff has always been in control. Stunning.
January 20, 2009
Rock star.
April 25, 2010
"Dear Ralph Lauren" is the best.
December 25, 2010
Robyn manages to fit huge amounts of information into a single poem beautifully and effortlessly.
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March 28, 2009Contrary's review:
http://www.contrarymagazine.com/Contr...
http://www.contrarymagazine.com/Contr...
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews