Cusp: Poems

by Jennifer Grotz

Book Overview

Entre chien et loup -- between dog and wolf. This French colloquialism for twilight informs Jennifer Grotz's debut poetry collection, Cusp. A winner of this year's Bakeless Prize for poetry, Grotz explores the peculiar territory of middleness -- neither dark nor light, not quite familiar but not fully unknown. It is a place with its own dangers, its own knowledge: road signs in a French tunnel remind drivers of their headlights in the temporary...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0618302468
• ISBN13: 9780618302468
• Release Date: August 2003
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 80 Pages
• Weight: 0.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.5" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

It's really quite good

Grotz's first collection is a rather impressive one. Yes it has its faults. It does sag in the middle, but the first section is wonderful and the final section is quite good. But the books also has its positive points. Grotz covers a wide range of styles and subjects in her poems. And though none stick out as a truly phenomenal poem, there are many good poems in the book. I look forward to seeing more of her work as she matures.

Give these poems the chance to speak to you

Unlike some of the other reviewers here, I am not a poet, nor do I want to be a poet. I just appreciate poetry that speaks to me, that opens my eyes to myself and the world in some new way. The poems in CUSP do that for me. The cool, meditative tone throughout the book allowed me to leave the outside world for a while and find a place inside myself that's like the West Texas countryside that underlies many of the poems -- a place of melancholy barrenness that is saved by the small, surprising wildflowers that survive there. For instance, the linking of the word sinner with seeing clearly for the first time in "New Glasses" resonated with me and my childhood experiences and then took me somewhere deeper. When Grotz described the "stuttering applause / of a waterfall against clay-smelling steps" I caught a whiff of similar places that I have experienced and then followed her to a new place, asking myself, as she asks of her Madonna: "And will she be object, then garment, then art, be emptied?" The meaning of a story or a poem is a creative partnership between the writer and the reader, and I appreciate the way Grotz has held up her side of the deal. Too bad several of the other reviewers here chose, for their part, to be jealously destructive rather than creative, but it's their loss. Buy this lovely little book, and when you read it, take the time to let its familiar elements take you by the hand to more unfamiliar places of discovery.

The best first-book I've read in years

In poetry, with few exceptions, courage comes late. But this book is that rare exception: a first book of poems that, whatever else one thinks of it, is courageous. A previous reviewer expressed displeasure with the literary allusions in the book. This is akin, I think, to the patron who told Mozart his new piece had "too many notes." Or perhaps it is a call for Grotz, who does sometimes sound like the smart kid in class, to shut up and behave like the rest of the girls. Such readers would seem to value above all those books which tell them what they already know. If you are such a reader, and if you prefer poetry by young poets who do not risk being labeled pretentious because they are ignorant of their place in the tradition (and ignorant of just how high the bar has been set), then don't buy Cusp. If you would rather NOT be visited by the ghost of John Keats, then steer clear. For this is a first book that is rare for its refusal to settle, as so many deeply conservative young poets do, for a singular, unalloyed, knowing response to the world. Grotz refuses to write with blithe indifference to that which came before her, and refuses to present herself as self-created. Instead, she seems to have a burning desire to face Keats, and Yves Bonnefoy, and Adam Zagajewski head on, and the audacity to join them in praising the world's plural, impure, and ambiguous splendor. I agree that, like almost all first collections, there are poems here that are not up to the level of Grotz' best. But then again, of how many collections can we not say the same thing? This is in many ways just to say that Cusp is a first book. But what is interesting about first books of poems, to me, is the way that they introduce, if we're lucky, a new way of grappling with silence: the almost crushing anxiety of influence. The very poems that a previous reviewer disliked for their allusiveness strike me as the place where Grotz finds a way into and through this silence... finds an opening in the tradition, and through that opening enters into the conversation. Its desire to join and even challenge past masters makes Cusp interesting, but what made me love and keep the book by my bed is the language itself: the sheer beauty of poems like "The Last Living Castrato," "Try," "Kiss of Judas," and the delicate homage to Keats, "Arrival in Rome." It is audacious for any poet to write an imitation of "Ode to a Nightingale," but something altogether more wonderful and rare to pull it off... to write the lines "... Now/ More than ever it seems impossible / To unthink the lover's hot breath against / The cheek, the ear, to brush / One's face up against the now..." A previous reviewer calls Grotz that nastiest of names, the "workshop" poet. But to me a workshop poet is precisely what Grotz shows herself not to be: a writer whose primary poetic influence is that dude in the third row, wearing sunglasses and a red sweater. The truth is that these poems do betray the poe

A lush and daring first collection.

One of the first things the reader will notice in this extraordinary first collection is that Ms. Grotz is not interested in neat, pithy "workshop" poems. The book opens with the speaker driving in a long, winding tunnel, unable to see either the entrance or exit. This is the emotional space Grotz is invested in: no clear way forward or back. Each one of these poems wades fully into a daring emotional urgency. And unlike many even very strong first collections, there are no disposable poems, nothing that reads like filler. Several of the poems express a consciousness of the fleeting nature of the present moment. Grotz makes us aware of how we spend most of our lives on the cusp of the future and the past, in a moment that slips away the instant we reach out to lay our hands on it. And yet rather than bemoan the possibility of an actual "now", the speaker in these poems only seems to regret not being able to give us the world in all its beauty and tragedy. Grotz urgently layers her poems with these images. In the "The Waves", she transforms what would be (in the hands of a less talented writer) a gentle, mundane meditation into,"The sensation of falling, of falling through falling until it's floating,/dissipation , erosion/ The way from a car one watches the hills come forward, a slow swell/on the ribbon of road that stretches forever/Or how buildings collapse, as if to their knees, tilting slightly to the side, swallowed in smoke".Even as Cusp exists in an ephemeral "now", it is equally oriented between places. In fact much of the book is set in two places that have never seemed further apart: France and Texas. I notice that another apparently college-educated reviewer who claims to be from Texas seems to find mention of anything French automatically "maudlin" and "snooty".Nationalistic biases notwithstanding, another great strength of this collection lies in Grotz's instinct for beauty at a rodeo, a demolition derby or on a rain-slicked Parisian Boulevard. The voice in these poems finds itself between a "terrain [that] resists gathering you up" and this stunning, though humble, vision of Angers:"a spotless ghetto of thin, white buildings,/no midnight, no field there, billboards/unfamiliar with the frenzy of circumflexes/and accent graves". Cusp attempts to reconcile this sense of being lost as the book progresses, but the velocity of the poems rarely diminishes. In the end, Grotz finds "not an end so much as an acceptance". Yet there is absolutely no manufactured serenity here. Grotz fiercely loves Cusp's divided world as much as she trusts and respects the reader. If this is her first collection, we should look forward to what promises to be a vital body of work.