Poetry
Garrison's first volume of poetry, A Working Girl Can't Win, was published in 1998. The poems in this volume focus on themes relating to the young female professional, friendship, love, grief and passion. Her second volume, The Second Child, published almost ten years after the first, deals mainly with themes related to motherhood. Reviews of Garrison's poetry have been mixed. Serious critics like one reviewer for Library Journal claim that "Garrison entertains, but shallowly." Similarly, William Logan of The New Criterion wrote, "It's not that these poems are bad, though they're bad enough; it's that they're not sure what poems should do." On the other hand, other critics are more positive in assessing her work. John Updike's comments are printed on the book jacket of Working Girl and reprinted liberally throughout book reviews. Of her poems he declares that, "with their short lines, sneaky rhymes, and casual leaps of metaphor, Garrison's poems have a Dickinsonian intensity and the American recluse's air of independent-minded, lightly populated singleness." Garrison is the first to acknowledge that her poetry would not be on Knopf's publication list and insists that her own poetry is not indicative either of her taste in poetry or in her breadth as an editor. However, her supporters suggest that the fact that her poetry is "accessible" and commercially successful (Working Girl sold over 30,000 copies) does not detract from its value. One critic warns that the reader should notice that "the accessibility of Garrison's free verse should not obscure the sound effects and subtle rhymes which give shape to the work...when the occasion calls for metaphor, Garrison is ready with appropriate responses." Any discussion of Garrison's work has led to a debate over whether poetry that is not obscure can be considered good. As a poet and an editor, Garrison expresses an interest in having more readers experience the enrichment that poetry can bring because, as she says, "most readers don't even know they need poetry." She also notes that, "Poetry can be pretentious sometimes, and if people feel poetry is this high citadel that you can't get into, it's bad for poetry."
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Famous quotes containing the word poetry:
“Prose—it might be speculated—is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard. The one is presumably articulate and social, a shared language, the voice of “communication”; the other is private, allusive, teasing, sly, idiosyncratic as the spider’s delicate web, a kind of witchcraft unfathomable to ordinary minds.”
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“Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.”
—Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)
“Much poetry seems to be aware of its situation in time and of its relation to the metronome, the clock, and the calendar. ... The season or month is there to be felt; the day is there to be seized. Poems beginning “When” are much more numerous than those beginning “Where” of “If.” As the meter is running, the recurrent message tapped out by the passing of measured time is mortality.”
—William Harmon (b. 1938)