Fran Landesman - Collected Poems

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A welcome collection

It is good to have Fran Landesman's poems collected in a single volume.  I was aware of her only from odd poems in anthologies or quoted occasionally by someone else, so I am glad to be able to take a serious look at her work – and it's generally very good.

Fran Landesman generally writes in formal stanzas using both rhyme and metre.  There's often an almost childlike simplicity to her metre which in the early poems doesn't work so well; some come across as rather amateurish sub-Dorothy Parker stuff – especially as her rhythm is pretty shaky and forced at times.  However, in the later poems it's a much more effective style: more tightly controlled and the maturity and skill she's developed make the contrast much more effective between the often umpty-tumpty feel of the rhythm and the more serious content. 

Her subject matter is often love affairs gone wrong, the yearnings of the heart and the sexist nonsense which she spent a lot of time pointing out and subverting very effectively.  It's often poignant and quite penetrating, and it's also witty and sometimes genuinely funny – like Yankee Doodle Londoner about the differences between US and UK English usages, for example. To give an example of her style, I liked "She" (for Hanja) which begins:

She so pretty, She so crazy

So delightful and so lazy

She make pictures, She make babies

All her life is full of "maybes"

She can light your darkest hours

She got visions, she got powers

Everything She makes unravels

Got no money, still She travels…

A very believable and recognisable portrait, I thought.

I don't think this is great poetry, to be honest, but there's some very good verse here which is often evocative and thoughtful, and the occasional very different-feeling poem, like the extremely atmospheric "Boy" for example, brings a sense of the depth which can sometimes get lost among the bouncing stanzas.  I'm glad to have this and to have made the acquaintance of these poems.  Fran Landesman's work is well worth reading and preserving, and I can recommend this collection.