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Pitt Poetry Series Winner of the 2007 Association of Writers and Reviews “Burn and Dodge is an apt title for this book. Dolin’s poems adroitly move in and out of shadow, shed light, contrast or blend as the context demands. The need to measure is strong in these poems, to examine how we live within the constraints of our emotions and how they get the better of us. Her language is lithe and motored, her meanings channeled by her formal devotions, without ever being reduced to mere accoutrements of form. She writes at the edge of compression, with such pop to her lines that I’m reminded of Auden’s definition of poetry—‘memorable speech.’” “Sharon Dolin dons her seven-league boots and leaps confidently over our small fenced-in territories (formalism, L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E, blahblahblah), picking from these gardens as she chooses, and devising wily new recipes of her own.”
“Sharon Dolin moves between tradition and innovation with dazzling agility, speed, and grace. ‘By fire. By stammering. Stoning. By water.’ Her poems hook us with their candor and wit. While many are meditations on guilt, regret, and doubt, this work has an innate optimism—a restorative quality—that encourages us to ‘lust for lust, hope for / hoping’ and ‘awaken each day, wanting / to want.’” “Whatever else she does with the American language, Dolin (Heart Work) has fun: the New York City-based poet’s fourth volume combines great verbal ingenuity with a vast set of subjects, some quite serious (motherhood, sex) some near the upper limits of light verse (eavesdropping on “the summer au pair"”), and some in between (a walking tour of Venice, “Tai Chi in Fog”). At home with the personal lyric, she sounds at least as happy when she can be self-consciously literary: when “Envy Speaks,” the personified emotion calls herself “a naked 500-year-old woman/ riding Death, saddled with a quiver of arrows.” Dolin works, to witty or masterful effect, in Marianne Moore’s syllabic stanzas, a sonnet sequence, ghazals, ultra-short-lined and fragmentary free verse, chatty prose poems, and deliberate imitations (of, among others, Moore, the Portuguese genius Fernando Pessoa, and the English peasant poet John Clare). Dolin’s best lines display both learning and wit-sometimes they sound comic, or flirtatious: “A lick over the foot doesn't qualify as a crime,/ though a cigarette butt or a soda can not thrown in a can/ can in the Netherlands.” Among contemporary poets, she may appeal both to fans of the very accessibly urbane (say, Deborah Garrison), and to those who admire more demanding wordplay (say, Kay Ryan). Attentive readers will find credible emotions, real problems of divided love and of middle-aged worry, amid the sometimes baroque surfaces of Dolin’s poems. But the surfaces matter: they are the gift she brings.” “Burn and Dodge, Sharon Dolin’s fourth full-length work (and Winner of the 2007 Association of Writers and Writing Program’s Donald Hall Prize in Poetry) is exceedingly fine. . . . I was surprised and delighted by Dolin’s language play and the complexity of her ideas. I experienced this book as a game for the brain. . . . In all sections and often with great success, Dolin plays with and mixes schools and forms such as ghazals and sonnets. Never purely an exercise for form’s sake, she uses wordplay and metre to question the boundaries of meaning.” “Burn and Dodge is large, and large. The poetry is not only steeped in tradition; it resonates with the demands of form and topoi and thrilling poetic avatars everywhere you look. . . . the poetry engages us for a kind of fluent struggle, that of a virtuoso budding to top form. The reaching is pesky and almost prickly, and almost piratical, and purposed to the full, based as it is primarily on the topoi of doubling. . . . And so the stolen doubles and the same selves multiply self-repeatingly with such fierce measure of life despite it all, with such alarming and arriving word-sensation, that reading Dolin’s splendid large new book, however testing, can both take your breath and warm your some-of-a-truth soul.”
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ISBN-10: 0-8229-6005-2 |
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Four Way Books, 2008 Reviews “At one level, these poems provide the rich, patient narrative of a tapestry: Here is a woman weeping on the subway. Here are jeans hanging in the light and air of a foreign city. Here are chairs, coffee cups, fountains, and roasted almonds. But the strength of this book is that the tapestry changes to a living, hurtful theatre: the poems keep breaking their own elegant surface to reveal the shadows of loss and memory and fear. These fine poems pull the reader in—enchanting, disturbing, and consoling, all at the same time.” “Far-traveling in both interior and outer realms, Sharon Dolin’s poetry ranges from the exploration of love, loss, and mourning to the unexpected kinships of New York daily life, to the spiritual celebration of new motherhood. Realm of the Possible is a book of hard-won recognitions and sensuous praises: precise, moving, and replete with a life spoken fully, a world given name in all its parts.” “Sharon Dolin’s Realm of the Possible is an ars poetica that explores, in both theme and style, the boundaries of a free-floating potentiality grounded in relation . . . . [in poem after poem that] thrives on a precise and visually appealing mix of images in surprising, intense juxtaposition. . . . She values the interconnectedness between the plainspoken and the sacred as she comfortably draws from the Torah, the Wisdom Literature, and from Jewish liturgy. . . . While integrating an impressive range of styles and poetic cultures, Dolin challenges the reader to enjoy the ephemeral questions.” “[T]he core of her book flares out in the second section . . . because this is where the poems begin to talk to each other. . . . We begin and end the collection with new life, but here the book takes shape as a process of burial. . . . They [the poems] move from lyric grief to the taking on of masks to a Plath-like confessional passion that feels fresh.” |
ISBN: 1-884800-57-2 |
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Marsh Hawk Press, 2003 Reviews “Serious Pink is playful, high-spirited, and deeply serious, and in it Sharon Dolin has done a seemingly impossible thing: her poems have the presence of paintings, a vivid materiality. Her fields of color vibrate . . . and the language of which they are made involves us in a deeply individual, engaging sensibility.” “These cool, beautiful, intelligent lyrics take seeing (and especially seeing paintings) as metaphor for everything else: mistakes, regrets, betrayal, despair; and finally are, I think, almost more like paintings than poems-paintings that, as Howard Hodgkin says about the pictures he longs to make, ‘will speak for themselves.’” “Sharon Dolin’s Serious Pink is a series of ecstatic ekphrastics, a collaboration with and celebration of visual art. Dolin steps into each painting she references, first obsessed with image and pose, then leaps beyond the frame to enlarge her quirky narratives. . . . A dazzling, sensuous, and serious book.” “Serious Pink is fascinating in that it both brings certain paintings to life in words and inspires the reader to try and see the originals.”
“[T]he poems don’t try for some verbal analogue to painterly abstraction. Instead, they celebrate opportunities for collaborative inspiration. . . Serious Pink is an important book, especially for those interested in the ongoing relationship and interplay between the visual and verbal arts.” “Serious Pink’s poems arise organically from the arbitrariness of their starting points to transcend their initial constraints. By doing so, they are freed into poems capable of offering visual delight to the ears as much as the eyes—yet another proof of how Love defies categories.” “Charles Wright says that great poetry contains profondo notes that swell. Sharon Dolin’s ekphrastic meditations on the work of Richard Diebenkorn, Joan Mitchell, and Howard Hodgkin, as well as an extended poem entitled ‘Ode to Color,’ are just such notes. Seeing the paintings is not necessary to appreciate each poem as a masterwork.”
“[T]his is a rich book, not difficult to enter, but difficult to resist rereading and experiencing, both for the feeling and the wit and the delight of the poetry, the language, the smarts, the consideration for the reader’s experience and also the richness and solidity of the poet’s experience as transformed into poems.”
Full Online reviews Jacket Magazine review by Eileen Tabios. |
ISBN: 0-9713332-6-2 |
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The Sheep Meadow Press, 1995 Reviews “Sharon Dolin has already earned exceptional distinction as a poet and is without question a writer whose work will help to define the resources and determinants of her generation.”
“The poems in this outstanding first collection are notable for their clarity, audacity and depth—compelling in their dramatic urgency and emotional power.” “I cannot remember when I have read as original and moving an elegy as the one in this wonderful new book. In a time of self-conscious and muffled poems about love and death Heart Work is fresh, vivid, and raw.” “The urgent, visceral images and rhythms draw us immediately into these poems.” |
ISBN: 1-878818-42-2 |
