Reviews of Old Stranger:
Publisher’s Weekly:
“The observant sixth collection from Larkin. . .offers an extensive miscellany while continuing the poet’s career-long interest in the body. ‘The body/ inside me is all thumbs,’ she admits, and ‘My body,/ too, is a sealed record:// violence buried in stone/ I’m quarried from.’ Poems inspired by musical instruments, objects, artworks (by Pierre Bonnard, Camille Claudel, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Wayne Thiebaud), animals, and linguistic characters (‘Hyphen,’ ‘Ampersand’) interweave with reflections on painful memories (‘the abortion/ that’s haunted my whole life’). The title poem describes the speaker’s reunion with a long-lost knife, ‘dark haft, trio of nickel silver/ rivets like moons of Pluto, thin blade stained as before,’ an apt metaphor for the book’s interest in writing as a weapon and tool, by turns delivering incisive wit and dislodging memories, ‘rak[ing]/ joy onto my plate while the gauze/ that wrapped my cut, reddened.’ Meditating on a lost mitten, the aging poet asks, ‘Will there be time (the thought/ blew past) to own another pair?’ Amid losses, restitutions, sudden joys, and unknowns, this volume sustains an appealing verve.”
Reviews of Blue Hanuman:
Publishers Weekly:
“Larkin's first full-length collection since her Audre Lorde Award-winning My Body: New and Selected Poems radiates with control and brevity. Larkin's attractive, enigmatic poems hover near a precipice, electrically charged with nascent tension, a ‘mute globe of held breath’ delicately suspended. Divided into four sections, the poems are short, ekphrastic, or riddle-like explorations of the natural world. ‘Legs Tipped with Small Claws,’ the title poem of her 2012 chapbook (Argos Books), describes a fishing spider: dangerous, sexy, and undoubtedly feminine. ‘Sometimes it’s her mate/ she liquefies to drink him inside out,/ then cleans each of her velvet legs.’ Larkin doesn’t rest at mere beauty, she digs deeper, probing at disturbances; the ‘movement-in-stillness’ of an old photograph, or the ‘lush rage-orange’ of a Francis Bacon painting. As for Hanuman, the collection’s eponymous monkey god: ‘his blueblack tail flicks upward,/ its dark tip a paintbrush loaded blue.’ Themes of motherhood are threaded throughout, muddying the boundaries between animal and human concepts of nurture and climaxing in the book’s final section of the book. Larkin’s haunting lines encapsulate the feeling of reading this collection: ‘You are inside me now, as inside you/ your mother: your shame-belly born from hers,/ my grief-lungs from yours, eyes of no mercy.’”
David Bergman, The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide:
“Joan Larkin’s new book takes its name from a painting ‘bought for a few annas,’ depicting the Hindu monkey god Hanuman ripping open his chest to reveal Rama and Sita, the perfect ruler and wife, hidden inside him. It is a fitting emblem for a book concerned with finding the human hidden in the animal, the spirit stuffed within the body, the past burrowed in the present and vice versa. Finding these hidden properties requires both delicacy and determination. They do not show themselves without pain. The poems—all short, most in one stanza—are like hard seeds that need to be cracked and ground. For example, in ‘eye,’ a strange underwater arctic beast some of whose legs ‘eat what blooms/ between ice crystals’ speaks to us only after we have sent our camera down ‘six hundred feet/ under the ice shelf.’ Sometimes we get there almost too late, as in ‘The Porch’ in which Larkin observes a spider producing a ‘shining dome’ out of her ‘small steel body’ to preserve the corpse of a moth caught in her web.
All animals live on other life. Their survival requires the death of other living beings. The ravages of life are ravishing in these poems. ‘Weddell Seal,’ one of the simplest and most extraordinary poems in this marvelous collection, issues from the voice of the seal who ‘fell from sealmother’s/ liquid womb into fast-ice/ and she suckled me with her thick/ milk and kept me, fifty days.’ It ends fifteen lines later with the seal old and toothless, the prey of other predators, aware that ‘sea-stars, worms, and flesh-eating/ amphipods will slowly cover/ me and devour my meat.’ Until then, she remains ‘standing in the wind,/ seal flesh still warm.’ Now in her seventies, Joan Larkin is a poet used to standing in the wind, but her flesh glows with primordial heat.”
Reviews of My Body:
David Ulin, Los Angeles Times:
“For nearly 40 years, Joan Larkin has written poems that stake out a territory of relentless self-examination, taking on love and death, family and sexuality in a voice that is unsentimental, ruthless and clear-eyed. Born in 1939, she is of a generation of women who often subjugated their truer selves to social expectation; that tension, which culminated in her coming out as a lesbian, is fundamental to her work.
Larkin is also a recovering alcoholic, and her poems about this experience are among the finest ever written on the subject — the testimony, without cant or doctrine, of someone who has survived. For her, poetry is a form of witness; she offers no false hopes, no resolutions, except to reflect, as honestly and directly as she can manage, the complicated, at times uncontrollable, messiness of being alive.
My Body: New and Selected Poems gathers generous samplings from Larkin’s three previous collections, as well as a substantial array of new material. It’s a remarkable statement, tracing the evolution of a poet from her earliest efforts ("My mother gave me a bitter tongue. / My father gave me a turned back,” she begins “Rhyme of My Inheritance”) to the stunning sweep and simplicity of her current work.
I’m older than my father when he turned / bright gold and left his body with its used-up liver / in the Faulkner Hospital, Jamaica Plain,” Larkin writes in “ Afterlife.”
Best of all is the transcendent “Blackout Sonnets,” a sonnet crown (seven linked sonnets, joined by repeating first and last lines), which originally appeared in her 1986 book, “A Long Sound.” “I drank anything and slept with everyone,” she acknowledges, “and kept my mouth shut about the abortion.”
This is poetry without pity, in which despair leads not to degradation but to a kind of grace.”
David Bergman, The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide:
“There are few poets in America who can combine Joan Larkin’s formal mastery with her emotional intensity, and so it has been something of a mystery to me why she’s not better known or more widely valued as one of the finest poets in America. Unlike so many poets who lose emotional force as they get older, Larkin grows stronger as time goes on. The new poems in this volume are by far the best she has written. Perhaps Larkin’s failure to win a wider audience is the result of her tackling for many years a subject that men would like to claim as their own—alcoholism. If you put Franz Wright’s poems of drunkenness beside Larkin’s, it’s perfectly obvious who has written the better work. Yet Wright gets published by Farrar Straus and Larkin by Hanging Loose Press. But I think Larkin’s limited recognition also derives from something else: Larkin gives no place for the reader to hide, no easy consolations to cheer you up no matter how bleak things are. And things are bleak—but also joyous and mysterious—and you’d better get used to it and pay attention so that you can see that “Heaven is fire, too.” Unlike so may AA veterans, Larkin retains no belief in a higher power. As she writes in “Tough-Love Muse,” “Praise grief all you want,/More loss is coming.” But Larkin deserves no more loss. The arrival of the recognition she deserves should be on the way.”
Alicia Ostriker, The Women’s Review of Books:
In a youth-addicted culture, it is a pleasure to read the work of grown women. Having recently arrived (full disclosure) at threescore years and ten, I find myself less often surging to read prizewinning first novels and books of poems by brilliant young authors, and more inclined to see what maturity has to say. Women’s wisdom, as well as artistic finesse, is what I seek nowadays in poetry. In particular, poets who prove themselves able to face the worst, in the body politic and the body, and to survive unsubdued, win my gratitude. Here are two such poets. . . .
Reading the new poems in Joan Larkin’s My Body, you will find yourself thinking you’d like this poet as a friend. Scene after scene, whether she is writing of her daughter’s birth, or a man’s ecstatic testimony at an AA meeting, or the AIDS deaths of friends, or poignant memories of parents, or aging kin, or “faking boredom” as a high school girl starting to be a serious drinker and watching “as Ella in a black gown landed exactly/ on each note of From This Moment On,” or being beaten by her mother, or abortion, or hot sex, or cold sex, or demonstrating at a presidential inauguration while the black Stetsons and draped minks sneer by, “faces smooth and satisfied/ The bullies’ feast was beginning”—every poem is a document of awesomely generous attention and care. Here in its entirety is a poem entitled “The Atheists,” near the end of a gritty sequence about the poet’s brother and his dying wife. Eight lines seem to suggest the whole story of four characters:
He was 5’5”, thin hair combed slant.
He leaned on the syllable us in Jesus
Larkin has not only the clear-sighted compassion of a Chekhov, but also his instinct for narrative and some of his sly wit, especially when targeting self-importance. I remember my glee reading, back in 1975, “Vagina” sonnet, from her first book, Housework.
Here’s the octet:
A famous poet told me, “Vagina’s ugly.”
Meaning, of course, the sound of it. In poems.
Meanwhile, he inserts his penis frequently
I mean, of course, the sound of it. In poems.
Then came the snappy close, in which the poet decided it was
this minor issue of my cunt’s good name.
threshold to threshold, shit streaming from his diaper,
one who refused to see his mother,
one who refused to speak to his brother,
one who refused to let a priest enter his room,
and its final line is “one who wanted to live till his birthday, and did.” Numerous elegiac poems to friends and kin create their personalities so clearly and kindly that you think you know them yourself. Also numerous are poems evoking love affairs long and short, “the hot feast” on one occasion and “she smeared the lube/ the way you’d spread margarine” on another, equally precise. An early crown of sonnets on what may or may not have been a rape had me holding my breath, and at the same time burning with admiration for the poet’s acknowledgment of complicity. When Larkin in the title poem of My Body gives us a lengthy list of its flaws, but concludes that it is “still responsive to the slightest touch,/ grief and desire still with me,” and “healed and healed again,” I can only applaud.”