Sally van Doren's "Sex at Noon Taxes"

These are poems about the female body, sex, and sexual politics. They try to be playful and deep, but I find most of them tiring and slight. All of them are written in fourteen lines, but only in a few instances--"Proposition," "Connecticut Sonnet," "Odalisque"--does the form find its justification in the content. The language is an uneasy mixture of registers: slangy, crude, academic, lyrical, archaic. Sometimes, unintentionally funny, as in the title poem, which opens the collection. Describing sex as a gallop up a mountain, the sestet goes:

The steeds bear us upslope.

We reach the muddy cleft

between Maroon Bells

and Crested Butte, gnawing

on caribou and warmed

liver of once noble elk.

.

Maroon Bells? Crested Butte? 

The poems are organized into four numbered sections. I find the second most wearying. The poems in it have titles like "Preposition" and "Pronoun/Punctuation." "Conjunctions" begins:

Furthermore, until but

dethrones however

while nevertheless pilots

since out of that's

atmosphere . . .

This is the kind of poem a bright middle-schooler, bored during a grammar lesson, might scribble on the back of a worksheet. At times, the wordplay, combined with a strong evocation of situation, is urgent and direct, as in the opening of "Breathe When I Expire":

the here is the why of summer this sentimental hole wedged

between Paris Provence and a labored wedding

removed from the when of death and rain the where of a scream and a white face

the how of the gash the blue bone and the fall into the pillow

but, much more often, the wordplay seems decorative, even obstructive. When the poet drops the mannerism, and writes with a plain honesty, her little scenes resonate beyond their chosen confines.

Girlhood

Alone in the basement

hiding naked behind

the washing machine,

I spied on my father

looking for his ironed

shirt, watched two

repairmen work on the

furnace and heard

another flush out the 

drains.

XXXXXGirl, soundless,

pinned between the hot-

water hookup and the

AC adaptor on an ever-

lasting winter morning.