'These Poems Are Exhilarating': Lynn Melnick Praises Diane Wakoski's Enduring Badassery

The latest installment of Los Angeles Review of Books features Lynn Melnick's astounding, wonderful close reading of Diane Wakoski's work. Wakoski's 23rd collection of poetry, Bay of Angels, published by Anhinga Press in 2013, is a chart-topper. In her assessment, Melnick writes "In a literary scene not unlike the Southern California of Wakoski’s youth, a scene that tends to fade out its aging starlets, Wakoski earns a read, and another." More:

FOR MORE THAN TWO DECADES, a Monday has rarely passed where I haven’t thought of “Blue Monday,” Diane Wakoski’s bleak, beautiful, incantatory masterwork:

Blue of the heaps of beads poured into her breasts
and clacking together in her elbows;
blue of the silk
that covers lily-town at night;
blue of her teeth
that bite cold toast
and shatter on the streets;
blue of the dyed flower petals with gold stamens
hanging like tongues
over the fence of her dress
at the opera/opals clasped under her lips
and the moon breaking over her head a
gush of blood-red lizards …

This is the first stanza and it continues without misstep for eighty lines. Wakoski’s talent is like that: relentless, sneaky, smart.

In Bay of Angels, Diane Wakoski’s 23rd and most recent collection of poems, she continues with her career-long tropes and obsessions: love and betrayal, strong male figures and absent male figures, beauty and its shame-faced opposite. Amid references to old arms and aching knees, to the feeling that “No one listens to me. / And it doesn’t matter,” to the harsh realities of a woman growing older in our youth-obsessed culture, Bay of Angels follows the clear line that runs from the poet’s earliest books forward.

This collection is probably not the place to first discover Wakoski, one of our too-often overlooked writers of this and the last century, but for lovers of the poet and lovers of poetry, it is more than worth reading where Wakoski has taken her talent. In a literary scene not unlike the Southern California of Wakoski’s youth, a scene that tends to fade out its aging starlets, Wakoski earns a read, and another.

Continue at LARB.