Comic, elegaic, and always formally intricate, using political allegory and painterly landscape, philosophic story and dramatic monologue, these poems describe a moment when something marvelous and unforeseen alters the course of a single day, a year, or an entire life.

What more do you want?


I don't know:   April 22, 2002
 9 out of 22 found this review helpful

All I can do is laugh at this poet's ability to turn every image into a cause for self-celebration. This is the work of an MFA program. Look at me; look at me!


Now This One Just the Same...   April 12, 2002
 6 out of 18 found this review helpful

I have such trouble with the poetry of this latest generation: the poetry seems just like prose chopped up into lines, randomly. Obviously there is a difference however. Yet I don't see it here. I see a lot of vast imaginatory work, but the self-possession of the speaker or narrator, whomever this young girl is, is just too distracting for me to care about the poems themselves.


style can be substance   January 27, 2002
 4 out of 7 found this review helpful

The interest of this book is much more in its sound than in what it has to say, but its sound, its textures, its sense of oddness and whimsy have, in themself, such force and skill that it almost becomes message. I think that work like this is informing the work of a wide range of poets from the traditional to the "experimental," and that's a good thing(change is good!). That's partly because Harvey and a few others are more lush, sexy, pleasingly insouciant that even slightly earlier elliptical poets. Perhaps it's Harvey and Shaughnessy and young poets like them who will, finally, reinvent the lyric--the genre in which where the pleasure is more in the music than the message. This stuff is not the be all and end all of poetry--no particular style of writing is--but thank goodness there's a multiplicity of voices. If you feel like your style of poem is being temporarily shoved out by this style, read this, learn from it, do your own thing, and wait a few years till the pendulum swings back to you.


Why so much bile?   November 29, 2001
 3 out of 5 found this review helpful

Why are the customer reviews here so arch and mean? "Pity the Bathtub" is hardly an obscure book. It is about to go into its third printing, and this I heard from the director of the Press that published it. On top of that, Harvey's book, along with a few other first books, have made the big NY Houses suddenly pay a little more attention to poets early in their careers due to the sales of these books. All that aside, this is a fine debut. And if use of language is the key to predicting a poet's career, Matthea Harvey will have a long and August one ahead of her.