Eve

Though noted as a scholar, Finch is a poet in her bones, and EVE is the most delightful and original poetry I've run across in years. . . . Besides a considerable knowledge of myth and poetic forms, Finch has a knowing way with sound. What she proves here is that rhyme-and-meter isn't just a formerly fashionable sort of bondage, the equivalent of a whalebone corset, but is instead a bio-acoustic key to memory and emotion, which existed prior to the written word. And it still works. . . Finch strains not at all, taking to formal verse as her namesake bird takes to air. Again and again in this book, I found myself shocked with pleasure as image, idea, and sound spun out in a perfect braid. And Finch manages not in just a few poems, but throughout. Manages, hell. She ties it up in nine colors of ribbon and then dances on the tabletop. Throughout the book there are phrases that ring and images that haunt: "Gray nature, make a dusk of me,/ and let me keep my ties." I love that. Finch refreshes both the art of poetry and that of clear thinking. EVE is a stunning, serious achievement, and also great fun. So I'll recommend it in the highest, with bells, whistles, fireworks, and only one cautionary note. Once you start reading, it's hard to stop. So-remember to breathe.

Women's experiences, past and present, real or invented, fill the pages of this engrossing debut. Nine sequences of lyric poems are organized around ancient goddesses, including "Brigid," the divine ancestor of the ancient Celts; "Coatlique," the oldest pre-Columbian deity; "Nut," a goddess of AFrican and, later, Egyptian mythology; and "Aphrodite." The poet puts her own spin on the events of Genesis in the compelling "No Snake": "Inside my Eden I can find no snake. / There's not one I could look to and believe, obey and then be ruined by and leave / because of, bearing children and an ache." Finch, who co-edited A Formal Feeling Comes (1994), reinforces the power of her invention with musical and rhythmical lines, as in "Strangers": "She turned to gold and fell in love, / She danced life upside down. / She opened up her eyes again / and asked some strangers in." Among the formal structure employed in several of the poems is a Welsh form, the Awdl Gwyydd, and a four-beat accentual line, found in Sumerian poetry. "Coy Mistress" ("You've praised my eyes, forehead, breast; / You've all our lives to praise the rest") is a witty response to Marvell's "Coy Mistress." In clear, modulated language, Finch deftly captures the immanence of these figures and their stories and compares them to particular experiences of modern women.

In the course of the less than four dozen pages of poetry in EVE, Annie Finch transforms herself into a hawk, a bell, a horse, a constellation, a cat, a snowflake, a coy mistress, an unspecified raptor, Salome, and a wing. Her shape-shifting may be more overtly metaphorical than that of the recently deceased Carlos Castaneda, but Finch's changes seem at least as signficant and deeply felt. Castaneda's metamorphoses served as passports to various self-discoveries. Finch's journey is toward an imagined paradise--toward the post-patriarchal possibilities of culture, language and human relationships, routed through the remnants of pre-patriarchal myths and folkways. Instead of peyote, Finch's chief mode of transportation (and transformation) is via incantational rhyme, imagery, and rhythms. The poems take an even greater variety of forms than the poet. In the poem "Tribute," FInch claims Emily Dickinson as her chief literary influence, and in the context of her EVE, a collection of poetry with central and conscious matrilineal themes, the reader might well assume that Dickinson is being inducted as an ancestor. "Her voice has vanished through my own," Finch audaciously claims, and it is to her great credit that a reader familiar with Dickinson will not feel that Finch suffers by this self-imposed comparison. Gnomic, lyrical, intricate and deft, Finch's poetry brings Dickinson's to mind even without "Tribute." If Finch's work rarely attains the oceanic amplitude of its model, it has a post-feminist jauntiness and a theoretical and cultural sweep unavailable to Dickinson. . . With this core of reverence for the past, more specifically, the marginalized, female past, there is a pointedness to the traditional, but subtly tweaked use of meter, utilizing an impressive variety of rhythms. In her book of criticism, The GHost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse (Michigan, 1993), Finch has made a case for non-iambic feet, trying to do for the much-maligned trochees and triple rhythms what Baskin and RObbins did for offbeat icecream flavors. . . and so it is intriguing, though not crucial to the enjoyment of EVE, to see Finch's brilliantly arcane theories put into practice here. . . Finch's generation of poets were not generally encouraged to explore the possibilities of form. Her impolitic choice was to use everything in the toolbox, and to learn to use it expertly. To debut with such maturity and accomplishment is rare. Here is a full-fledged poet, that literary culture will need to track and study in flight, and who any reader of poetry will want to enjoy.