A runner-up for the National Book Critics' Circle Award, Harvey offers a mixture of prose poems and standard verse in Modern Life, which accurately reflects the sense of foreboding terror that fills any serious news-watcher. Without her dazzling skill for accuracy and imagery, her poems would be heavy with the turgidity and portentousness that sinks so much contemporary poetry along these lines.

Her closeness of observation manifests itself in "Ode to the Double-Sided Nature of Things," a Gothic spoof on the story of Noah's Ark. In the book's sections consisting of traditional verse, Harvey's talent with visual and verbal scare tactics begin to acquire a less parabolic, more serious torque. "A stickpin stirred in our stomachs," she introduces one typical contemporary scenario.

Yet Harvey's aesthetic includes the recognition that living fully in our war-wracked, fear-wracked world is a victory and that withdrawal is the cheapest, most deluded sort of safety.

—DIANN BLAKELY, FOR THE TENNESSEAN



[ Source ]