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(More customer reviews)When a 60ish high school teacher finally produces a slim volume of poems, everyone is supportive. She gets a little award; an old critic is exhumed to write a blurb. When she reads she's always introduced as a "schoolteacher," and everyone goes "Aww." Enough affirmative action. This teacher's poems are a C minus. Am I subjective? To read her poems is to doze through platitudes: "Hills" are "distant" or, if in California, "golden," Lake Tahoe is "Blue," hotel "terraces" are "leafy." "Woods" are "snowy." People "feel the earth move," or they "remember vividly," "sigh inaudibly" and "state specifically" (in a single poem!) and "everything seems pointless." Notice that rather than find the right verb Idris Anderson routinely used a cliché adverb to push a weak verb into place. Nor has she any ear for rhythm. Try to find the meter: "All the marks he makes have a meaning like every object / in his room, his books, slippers, cushions, scissors-- / all cut finely in the plate like iron filings drawn into place by those meticulous fingers." Indefinite antecedents, and shouldn't that read, "as every object... does." How could a high school teacher misuse "like" for "as?" (She marks papers?) Anderson hopes line breaks will convert her prose into poetry, but they become an annoying stammer. It's unnatural to halt in the middle of "makes/ vivid," "hauled in/ every morning" and Anderson won't turn "unruly mess" into less of a cliché by making it "unruly/ mess." It's comic, almost, waiting for the final banality. "The same unruly," wait for it, drumroll, "mess." "When we're," wait for it, "in love...." Go to You Tube, look up Bob and Ray's famous "STOA-- Slow Talkers of America" routine. (To be fair, look at the line breaks in her only real poem, "Face," to see how they should work.) Style is C minus; so what about content? Her chosen form, ekphrasis--poems about artwork--should help Anderson. It was assigned to schoolboys too young to have anything worth writing about. They could stand on a real artist's shoulders. Idris Anderson's poems are parasitic on some other artist's painting or photo, but she only manages to convert their gold into her usual lead. She describes a Monet painting as "encrusted with paints"--Ugh! Dried blood is "encrusted," not a Monet! Then Anderson praises the "holiest of mysteries, the fully encrusted mind." Experiencing Monet through her poems is like hearing Beethoven played on an accordion. As reviewers above have noted, primarily she drags us around on her summer vacations, to spots as cliché as her poetry. Her kids must think she's cool, seeking out the room where Keats died, but it's forty steps from American Express, tourist central. Every high school teacher goes there. What's next, a trip to Paris to write about the Left Bank? If Anderson didn't live in SF already, she would be writing about the cable cars and the fog. And Anderson always tells us what she and her partner had for lunch on the leafy terraces. (She recommends the "Kalamari.") "A kayak again. Blue Tahoe" reminds her of a kayak in "Kauai." Sounds like a nice life, honestly. Why can't she be happy being a high school teacher? Summer jaunts to intellectual tourist traps, kalamari on leafy terraces beside Blue Tahoe. Why try to write poetry? She just isn't creative. She tries every way to turn her timid observations into poetry, but it's just cliches in columns. Grade: C minus.
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