A Second Look at Beth Bachmann's Do Not Rise and Alice Fulton's Palladium

Lisa Russ Spaar got a reminder in the mail--when news about Alice Fulton's newest collection, Barely Composed appeared in her inbox--to revisit Fulton's previous collection Palladium, published back in 1986. It is Fulton's second book and bears close resemblance to another collection, Beth Bachmann's Do Not Rise, which appeared at the start of this year. From her column at Los Angeles Review of Books Lisa Russ Spaar weighs in on the collections's similar qualities. From LARB:

In making selections for this column pairing a second book of poetry written over 20 years ago with a recently published second collection of verse, I consider many things. Since second books of poetry often receive inadequate attention, I revisit them to emend critical oversight or to reclaim early work that might be lost to the vicissitudes of time and left out of the anthologizing, or otherwise fall prey to our cultural infatuation with what is new. Or I pick a second book that I feel signals a defining prelude, shift, apex, or development in a poet’s career. My process is usually to revisit that earlier second book and then re-read the poet’s first book, and talk about the second book as hinge, crucible, turning point, or amplification of style and subject, all in light of the work that has transpired since.

In the case of Alice Fulton — whose work I have prized since I encountered her first full-length book, Dance Script with Electric Ballerina, winner of the 1982 Associated Writing Award for a book of poems — the idea for including her in this series occurred to me when I received in the mail last fall an advance copy of her newest book, Barely Composed (W. W. Norton, 2015), Fulton’s first collection of poetry to appear in over a decade. Reading through Barely Composed, which I did at one sitting, I was flooded with somatic memories of my initial immersions into Fulton’s early books, in particular Palladium, her second, selected by Mark Strand for the National Poetry Series and published in 1986.

I should admit right now that I have a short attention span. Ordinarily any book containing poems of more than a page in length will be a volume I need to put down and take up and put down many times before I can make my way through the whole. But Fulton’s poems in Barely Composed, though often running to two or more pages, arrested me immediately and irresistibly. [...]

To Bachmann and more at LARB.