Title: Decent first drafts, but certainly not a publishable manuscript
Product review: Christl Verduyn, Silt (Guernica, 2002)Christl Verduyn's first collection almost gets there, but not quite. The characters, and the situations in which she places them, are interesting enough to hold the readers' interest, but the language is often awkward; language is, of course, the most important part of poetry. It's hard to imagine anyone writing the lines "Water breaks/and oh! Rapture" and still be surprised when someone pegs the poem for a piece out of the nineteenth century. At other times, the language is more subdued, but prosaic:"I sort rubber ringsstack extra lidsarrange my memoriesof you neatlyin vacuum packed jars..."("Cold Storage")There's a good deal of promise here, but this reads more like a first draft turned into a writing workshop than a finished, and published, manuscript. **
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