Voice-Over

by Angie Estes

Angie Estes’ Voice-Over explores the erotics of language and its meanings in poems both experimental and lyric. This stunning collection of poems was the winner of the 2001 FIELD Poetry Prize.

Genres: Poetry

84 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2001

Reviews

[Steven · Rating 2 out of 5]

My main issue with post-modern poems, of which the work in this volume fits, is that they often seem scattered and unfocused. After reading through the poem several times, it is difficult to pinpoint a theme or even a single idea that shines through. Instead, they seem to function by forcing readers to think a little bit about several ideas, whereas most other contemporary poetry makes us ponder a while on a single subject. My preference is definitely for the latter. Still, I can appreciate the intellectual and linguistic stimulation of reading this work and the bigger issues that it is interested in exploring. In this collection, Ms. Estes uses an exhaustive amount of quoting and paraphrasing from a plethora of sources to construct each of her poems. By doing this, she’s indirectly raising a lot of questions about what is “original” in writing and reinforcing the work of poets such as Harryette Mullen, who espouse the practice of “intertexuality” – the juxtaposition of several texts from a multitude of sources to find their parallels and their gaps. On this level, the word play that ensues is very intelligent and astute, again making me think briefly about the sources and interplay of our language. However, I still find there to be many issues to this approach. One that was prevalent in this book was the use of pronouns with no antecedents, which create huge gaps in reason and distract greatly from the poems' momentum. If this is intentional, its reasoning is unclear. So, overall, I would like to keep reading a volume of work like this every once in a while to keep up with what this movement is doing, but I’ll only return to the few poems that add an emotional resonance to their word play.

[Kent · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are some really beautiful poems in this book, poems like "Rhapsody," where the experience of language, and the net effect language uses in order to put forth a meaning, is very artfully treated. At other times the combinations of images and language and sounds are just ungraceful, kind of awkward even.