THE YELLOW HOTEL
Diane Wald, . . Verse, $12 (88pp) ISBN 978-0-9723487-2-0
"Informality was queen. King?" Wald asks near the middle of her smart new collection, and she goes on to establish its curious reign: the Bohemianism of her open-ended poems and sequences charts a middle course between Steinian cadences and the chattiness of second- or third-generation Beats. Long-lined, multi-page efforts (some bordering on the conversational prose poem) venture out into the world with explanations that hazily invoke the autobiographical ("I awoke with a backache because of all this dreaming and boating") then veer into abstract territory: "Everything has become/ what it least expected." Wald's longer works can feel less like discrete poems than like journals, but they are compelling, inventive journals, full of "Ideas in bed/ and how they fled." While the sequence "The Fear As the Height of Folly" offers exceptional examples of attention to each word, other work (including the four-page title poem) promises exactly the opposite, a casual propulsion attention (a la Bernadette Mayer) that renders ideas and images as they arrive. After decades of small-press and chapbook publishing (Wald's last collection,
Reviewed on: 11/25/2002
Genre: Nonfiction