Customer Reviews (2)

Without a Net
I turned once again to Kathleen Fraser's intriguing TRANSLATING THE UNSPEAKABLE after a long hiatus, for I had seen a recent essay by her and it struck me once again that the older essays, collected here in this handsome volume from Alabama, had real qualities of composition and inspiration, though they perhaps struggle here and there for what she can now employ effortlessly, like Alec Guinness, that assured mastery of the form.Plunging right in, I felt the top of my head coming off as from every corner of (nearly) every page a rainbow of arrows hurled themselves at my brain."What's messing up my tidy defense system, about to leave me open for attack?"

We go to Fraser first off for the inquiring turn of her mind, then for the activist spirit she has displayed in so many contexts, both in writing and in life.Often she returns to her own history, a story of a woman who got very lucky very early (having Frank O'Hara as a friend!) and who was also dismissed, neglected and put on the shelf for gender reasons, and who managed to find a way to overcome this prejudice both theoretically and practically.Like Alex Haley's ROOTS, Fraser's TRANSLATING is a book of ancestor hunting, for like Haley she believes in the totemic power of those who came before, holding their lamps, shedding their light into out dim present and questionable future.In college she was taught a steady diet of marvelous male modernists, and it wasn't until later that she wondered why, except for Enily Dickinson, and a bit of Woolf, she was not introduced to any actual woman writers.The battle over the canon is just part of the texture of these essays, but it is always a stirring saga, one we return to with fascination like Civil War buffs.

Her studies of individual poets (Niedecker) are always to the point, and one essay here always catches my eye, her focus on the relationship between two very different writers, Mina Loy and Basil Bunting, which is among the best criticism I have seen of either poet.It is a book of keen observations, the poet Steve Benson for example sharing "the baffled seriousness of brilliant clowns like Stan Laurel."And a book of prophesy, for it ends with a consideration of Charles Olson's "Field" theory, embodied by feminist examples including Myung Mi Kim and Hannah Weiner, the page exploded a la Olson's poignant "Rose" poem.Today, with Fraser leading the way into further realms of typographical bewilderment and wonder, I read "Olson's Field" as perhaps her statement of intent, a map for what was to follow.

Alabama should have hired a copy editor long ago.It's a shame that the book misspells the names of Daisy Aldan and Michael Amnasan--and that's just the A's!

An engaging and innovative book
In this wonderful book of vibrant and challenging essays, Fraser questions the dominant forms of both poetry and culture without becoming overly polemical. So often, in claiming her own and women's territory, a writerwill mow down everyone who even remotely strays from her standards; butFraser's essays (the title one is a prime example) present and explain anumber of varying forms, a number of ways of working through what is to beworked through, without privileging any of them. When she writes aboutfinding her own voice in the sixties, or about starting the experimentaljournal HOW(ever), she manages to convey her struggle at that time withoutdamning The Oppressor. It's a difficult stance to take -- one which couldeasily be tarnished by watching the celebrated poets of the world preen inthe adulation of the academy -- and it filled me with a kind of buoyanthope for where literature might yet be going. ... Read more

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Two of the Houghton Mifflin, Invitations to Literacy - Early Success Books This is a Ten copy pack of Five copies each ... Read more