Vega, Janine Pommy, Pommy-Vega, Janine
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Product Description In Mad Dogs of Trieste, mythic figures glide past like giants over the landscape, showing the reader Janine Pommy Vega’s passionat
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e response to the death of her father, mother, friends and former times. Other poems repeat the call to get up, leave everything, go where one has never been. Ms. Vega’s writings are intensely autobiographical, following closely in the footsteps of her life-journey: they are the poetic record of her experience-hungry travels through the world and her spiritual retreats into herself; her work with public school children and delinquent youth, and with the inmates and staff of the New York State prison system; her friendships and her love affairs, her farewells and her lingering memories. For this major retrospective volume, she has selected the best lyrics, protests, portraits, and elegies from her first twenty-five years of writing. From Library Journal Arranged in six sections, Vega!s 12th book of poems provides an in-depth tour of her poetic oeuvre. Each section echoes Vega!s recurrent themes: nature, death, prisoners, family history, and travels in Ireland and in South America. This collection, like many of the individual poems in it, could have used some editorial winnowing. Though Vega often shows a deftness of touch and a keen ear for language, the shorter poems are more powerful: dear butter/ your blues/ your mouth harp sweet/ chicago/ winter nights. In poem after poem, Vega shows herself to be an adept poet of place"as in the title poem, which describes a cafe in Les Halles: after a night we could find the strong/ men from the market/ and the beautiful prostitutes/ resting in each other!s arms/ Le Chat Qui PIche, Le Chien Qui Fume/ alive with Parisian waltzes, his hands on her ass. Unfortunately, when Vega tackles political issues, polemics dominate: Dear Nuclear Commission: Don!t you have children?/ Or grandchildren? What about them? But when she writes from the heart"as in To You on the Other Side of This, a love poem to a murdered son as well as a battle cry of anger directed at his killer"we are immediately drawn in. Recommended for larger poetry collections and all academic ones."Doris Lynch, Monroe Cty. P.L., Bloomington, IN Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. Review “In Vega's poetry there is a living language, a living human being. . . She goes to many places [and], like Henry Miller, always ‘tears off a piece.’”––Jennifer Stone, KPFA FM “An honest and passionate road map to her soul, a book describing one poet’s life as a pilgrimage toward herself. It is an exhilarating trip.”―American Book Review
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