"Mass language is the medium of 'communication,' and its users are less interested in bringing to formal order what is sometimes called the 'affective state' than in arousing that state."Jerusalem, beloved , Ms. Brandt's recent foray into platitudinous personal utterances masquerading as poetry, provides readers with an anonymous voicing of numb and wearisome lyrical commonplaces (swathed in that ubiquitous grandiloquent mass-language glow).with you all the old wounds, scars in my flesh, Jerusalem, beloved opens with a quasi-political touristic lament for oppressed Palestinians. In this piece of propaganda's title sequence, Ms. Brandt takes up the Intifada cause, cataloguing the devastation wrought by Israeli occupiers: homes and olive groves levelled by bulldozers; endless border checks and searches; youths throwing stones; women weeping at wailing walls; Israelis toting machine-guns; and, not surprisingly, searing testimonials of tortured prisoners punctuate the writer's reportorial litany as she relays her reactions to the horror she discovers during her holiday in Jerusalem (made possible with thanks to her Palestinian benefactors she thanks in her acknowledgements to those who financially assisted her pilgrimage to the Holy Land).
Ms. Brandt, evidently a graduate of the Sacred Ego School of Composition, gives neither intrinsic nor extrinsic poetic justification for this loose and lazy see-me-seeing-that-squalor-or-this-tragedy-or-that-movie attitude which infects and defeats the book's edifying intentions; hence, the opening sequence a political exercise filtered through a CNN haze never delivers on its implied promise to offer readers an unmediated experience of a solid self situated in the Holy City. Like the tourists the writer takes great pains to ridicule, she cannot see for looking inward.almost echoes without saying that one of the most popular beers in Canada, Blue Light, possesses a sparkling amber hue; plus, if Ms. Brandt hoped to evoke memories of Gwenolyn MacEwen's poetry; sadly, she fails to scratch the surface of the great poet's work.)the trees are singing in loud whispers, against the vice versa ). This triptych exhibits distressing signs that Ms. Brandt does not fully comprehend the art, craft, shape, and tradition of poetry, preferring to depend upon anachronistic stylistic tics instead of considerations of rhythm, unity, and form.The Waste Land with repeated and hackneyed rehashings of "red rocks" and "the heart of light"; however, beyond such amateurism, the self-referential "message" of these texts indicates a jejune formal sloppiness when it comes to said medium.Jerusalem, beloved concludes with "those of us who have daughters," a series of twenty entries revolving around mother and daughterhood juxtaposed with "the poem made out of darkness, so dark, it / swallows up the light, the white page, the eye / seeing, the i, seeing." and, appropriately, provides an excellent albeit unintentional epigraph for this collection (as well as a virtual deluge of similarly undisciplined collections currently on the loose in this country).
Award-winning poet and literary journalist Judith Fitzgerald Points Elsewhere , a new collection of poetry to be published next year. The resident of the Almaguin Highlands is co-partner with Frank Wilson @ Books, Inq. Times Literary Supplement, Sir Peter Stothard
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