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Title: Circumstantial Evidence: Poems by Joan Retallack ISBN: 0-911809-01-5 Publisher: Sultan of Swat Books Pub. Date: 01 December, 1985 Format: Paperback List Price(USD): $6.00

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Average Customer Rating: 4 (1 review)

Rating: 4
Summary: Seriously Dadaist poetry
Comment: Joan Retallack's work is full of questions and thinking-about-thinking; her life's work revolves around how and why we mean (also known as rhetorical semantics), and her main subject here seems to be the fragmentation and other uses of language and images, and the various ways in which language and meaning relate.

The poems of Circumstantial Evidence represent Retallack's work as published in Plowshares, Zzyzyva, and other popular mags on the edge during the eighties. Even today, they remain fresh and self-aware, with a sliding authorial voice which brings us rapidly from self-musing to vivid imagery and sceneray and back again.

Some excellent poems in this early collection, and some unique use of structure, including poems with directions on how to read them (and they need it!) and a poem whose every third line is a continued litany of popular magazines. My main complaint here is that Retallack's approach too easily lends itself to "lists," both in the middle of poems (where they threaten to take over any narrative) and threaded among poems as in the magazine list mentioned above. These lists can get tedious; unfortunately, they are a logical offshoot of the thought-play and language-play which she undertakes in this volume.

My favorite poem here remains "Wittgenstein at the Movies," but I have many favorites, which is rare for a work of poetry. Lovers of the obscure and wonderful will not be disappointed by the juxtaposition of images of blind piano tuners with lines like "why are there so many dead porcupines on the roads in maine?"