![]() ![]() If the poetry were better, perhaps some readers could forgive such self-indulgence. In “Künstlerroman,” Vuong describes being in a room of “crystal chandeliers, waiters with plates of caviar spoons, flutes of champagne” and being handed “a book, the artifact of his thinking.” He then signs it “a deliberately affected, illegible signature.” The whole poem is steeped in pitying melancholy, but it is hard to read and feel any other emotion than despair. But its originality does not save the poetry. If the first two are a return to the ground of his first collection, the latter is, at least, new. Over the next eighty-five pages, we are treated to twenty-seven poems of difficult parental relationships, the alienation of being a gay man in America, and - worst of all - the difficulties of being a famous poet. All atmosphere, near-ekphrastic dedication to description, and beautifully disconcerting turns of phrase (“I was a murderer / of my childhood”) - innocent readers would be forgiven for assuming they had opened a new, original book of poems. “The Bull” stands alone at the beginning of the volume: the speaker stares out into the darkness at an animal with “kerosene / -blue eyes” and attempts to reach him. Eliot-winning moment, and he’d be guaranteed that rarest thing for poets: literary fame, riches, and glory. ![]() All he had to do was improve a little since his T.S. Time is a Mother should have been a return to what Vuong is best at: the slim, contained, intense volume of poetry. ![]()
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