matt reviewed The Palm at the End of the Mind by Wallace Stevens
Review of 'The Palm at the End of the Mind' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
Mixed bag - it's a thorough collection so the good comes with the bad. It also took me forever to finish (I took maybe a 6-8 month break somewhere in the middle and picked it up again to read on the train). A lot of the longer poems got really heady and turned me off - it felt like he was reaching towards something he couldn't describe but tried to. The result was a kind of purposeful vagary of the poetry. I much preferred the more image and metaphor heavy poems - some were delightful. I liked: "Of Mere Being", "The Poem Took the Place of a Mountain", "World Without Peculiarity", "Someone Puts a Pineapple Together", "The Motive for Metaphor", "The Idea of Order at Key West", "Anecdote of the Jar", "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird", and "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock".