It’s been a while since I’ve thrown up a review of something I’ve read, and I rarely gush about a book of poetry, but I am in love with Sharon Dolin’s Burn and Dodge, Winner of the 2007 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry. What initially struck me was the vast grasp and versatility of form, the poems moving deftly among both traditional and experimental poetic modes, and yet remaining cohesive throughout. To highlight some of what you’ll find: a masterful homophonic sonnet sequence (Clare-Hewn), sonnet-ghazals (“Ghazal Without the Man” for one), and syllabics (“The Truth of Poetry,” “At the Reception, 1963” with their nods to Marianne Moore). I think the freshness of the language struck me most: the music hit my ear in new ways, its playfulness, its chiming and sing-songing, the word play not afraid to call attention to itself and the thing poetry is made of, putting the words foremost which only served to reinforce the images present. I delayed the finish to savor each syllable and am ready to read it again.
I think it only fair that I admit my aesthetic biases: I work in syllabics myself and love a good pattern; I love poetry that is in direct conversation with the Tradition and gives winks and nods to the voices that shape us and the ground that has been broken by the poets that have come before, even if it’s just something as casual as referencing a National Geographic in a dentist’s waiting room; I love a good set of notes at the end of a collection that helps provide guide posts and contexts for the poet’s obsessions within the volume, all the while explaining nothing but pointing toward where you can do more reading and research. I’m also more moved by poetry that gets me thinking, that has ideas fueling its imagery, poetry where the emotional intensity comes from the speaker caught in the act of thinking, thought process on the page. There’s plenty of that here, and while there are enough poems with narrative for those who crave a good, compressed story (“Jealousy,” “Pandora and the Summer Au Pair”), there are daring leaps too, such as the lovely word play and fixation on language as a thing in the “Current Events” sequence.
I think in the end all the things mentioned above put this book over the top as a game-changer for me, or at least a book to be inspired by and turn to as I set my own thinking process to the page, focusing thinking through form, the idea, the image transformed in the act, captured in a thing called poem.