I do not like monotonous voices in a collection of poetry. While some readers thrive on a consistency of voice, I think a collection benefits from a mixing of voices. I’m not the type of person who enjoys listening to an entire K-Tel album of power ballads. After awhile, they all sound the same. Singularity of voice does not necessarily tie a bunch of poems together to form a true collection.
Daisy Fried knows this, as is apparent in her award-winning poetry collection She Didn’t Mean to Do It. In her poems, Fried speaks of and for a wide variety of female characters: archetypes and individuals, the good, the bad, the morally questionable, the woman next door. Sometimes the voices or women in her poems are all of the above at the same time.
Fried’s longer poems captivate with their narrative, such as "A Story Having to Do with Walt Whitman." In the following excerpt, you can see that the very deliberate syntax structure Fried uses sets a pacing that teases you with details while at the same time coaxing the tale onward:
A friend of mine used to be, and still is, but only
legally, married to a dancer. The girl, this dancer,
his wife, had a teacher, one of those beautiful menschy
dancer men, who was dying of AIDS. He, the teacher,
as I imagine it, though it’s not always true for dancers
in his company, had done nothing in his life but dance.
But Fried also serves up some short, delightful imagistic poems like "Bulrush," "Steam," and "Clean." I love how she is also able to pull in elements of fairy tales, as in the poem "Princess Counting Peas":
This springtime of eggs finishing tick, tick, tick,
out of my body.
Here is one for each of my lovers,
here is one for tonight’s hanging planet,
one for the best man I let go.
She Didn’t Mean to Do It won the 1999 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize for a first full-length collection. I could spend hours singing this book’s praises but, instead, I’ll simply urge you to pick up a copy and see for yourself what exciting poems await.
69 pp.
