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Intruder: Poems
In this haunting, beautiful third collection from Jill Bialosky, the poet examines the intrusion of eros, art, and the imagination on ordinary life.
The lover who whispers “Is it still snowing? . . . Will you stay with me?” in the first poem reappears throughout the book in different guises—sometimes seemingly real, at other times as muse, doppelgänger, or dream. In “The Seduction,” as the lovers stand to watch a house fire— “gorgeous, dazzling, / the orange and reds of such ruin”—the poem, like the book itself, becomes a study in the nature of reality, selfhood, and the different levels of consciousness we inhabit. Evoking Penelope and Odysseus and Orpheus and Eurydice, Bialosky asks us to consider the instability of the self and the myriad forms it can take through art, in poems that are sexy, dark, and at once cool and emotional. The creation of the observing mind is paramount here; whether the lover goes or stays, the poems remain.
In Intruder —her most mesmerizing gathering of poems yet—Bialosky has captured not only the fleeting truths and pleasures of passion but also its mysterious dangers.
Don’t be afraid. Come closer. It’s bath time. The boy’s in the tub, Father’s shaving, Mother is dressed in her evening black silk slip, high heels, leaning on the tub’s edge.......
Look into Mother’s eyes. What truth do they belie?
from “Saturday Night”
The lover who whispers “Is it still snowing? . . . Will you stay with me?” in the first poem reappears throughout the book in different guises—sometimes seemingly real, at other times as muse, doppelgänger, or dream. In “The Seduction,” as the lovers stand to watch a house fire— “gorgeous, dazzling, / the orange and reds of such ruin”—the poem, like the book itself, becomes a study in the nature of reality, selfhood, and the different levels of consciousness we inhabit. Evoking Penelope and Odysseus and Orpheus and Eurydice, Bialosky asks us to consider the instability of the self and the myriad forms it can take through art, in poems that are sexy, dark, and at once cool and emotional. The creation of the observing mind is paramount here; whether the lover goes or stays, the poems remain.
In Intruder —her most mesmerizing gathering of poems yet—Bialosky has captured not only the fleeting truths and pleasures of passion but also its mysterious dangers.
Don’t be afraid. Come closer. It’s bath time. The boy’s in the tub, Father’s shaving, Mother is dressed in her evening black silk slip, high heels, leaning on the tub’s edge.......
Look into Mother’s eyes. What truth do they belie?
from “Saturday Night”
- GenresPoetry
96 pages, Hardcover
First published October 7, 2008
About the author
Jill Bialosky
17 books109 followersJill Bialosky was born in Cleveland, Ohio. She studied for her undergraduate degree at Ohio University and received a Master of Arts degree from the Writing Seminars at The Johns Hopkins University and a Master of Fine Arts degree from University of Iowa Writer's Workshop.
Her collections of poems are Subterranean (Alfred A. Knopf, 2001) and The End of Desire (1997). Bialosky is also the author of the novel House Under Snow (2002) and The Life Room (2007) and co-editor, with Helen Schulman, of the anthology Wanting A Child (1998).
Her poems and essays appear in The New Yorker, O Magazine, Paris Review, The Nation, The New Republic, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review among other publications.
Bialosky has received a number of awards including the Elliot Coleman Award in Poetry. She is currently an editor at W. W. Norton & Company and lives in New York City.
Her collections of poems are Subterranean (Alfred A. Knopf, 2001) and The End of Desire (1997). Bialosky is also the author of the novel House Under Snow (2002) and The Life Room (2007) and co-editor, with Helen Schulman, of the anthology Wanting A Child (1998).
Her poems and essays appear in The New Yorker, O Magazine, Paris Review, The Nation, The New Republic, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review among other publications.
Bialosky has received a number of awards including the Elliot Coleman Award in Poetry. She is currently an editor at W. W. Norton & Company and lives in New York City.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
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May 20, 2014The angel-filled St. Bonaventure Cemetery, made famous by John Behrendt’s MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL Several years ago, contains the grave of Conrad Aiken, friend of T. S. Eliot at Harvard and beyond, winner of the Poetry Society of America’s first Shelley Award, and now best known for his frequently anthologized story “Silent Snow, Secret Snow.” At the age of eleven, Aiken watched his physican father kill his mother, then himself. The latter two are entombed together in standing cenotaphs and Aiken’s own memorial, a bench set at a right angle, bears the inscription “Give my love to the world” and “Cosmos Mariner--Destination Unknown.” The aforementioned story concerns a child’s descent into madness, which is represented by his retreat into the oneiric realm of ever-mounting snow.
Aiken’s hometown and final resting place, Savannah, doesn’t receive much snow, unlike Cleveland, Ohio, and this particular form of precipitation flurries and blizzards throughout the work of native daughter Jill Bialosky. “Fathers in the Snow” is one of the most powerful poems in her first collection, THE END OF DESIRE; her first novel is titled HOUSE UNDER SNOW; last April, for POETRY DAILY’s series of National Poetry Month features, she published a commentary on Stevens’ “The Snow Man”; and INTRUDER, her newest volume of poems, contains several works--perhaps most notably the non-rhyming, decasyllabic sonnet sequence, “The Skiers”--in which snow joins the dramatis personae who comprise INTRUDER.
Bialosky has said in an interview--which begins with a long question about the way snow acts as a leitmotif in her work, with asides concerning Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and the snow-blotched appearance of the cover--that “a snow-filled mountain is almost a character in the poem.” Shelley’s “Mont Blanc,” and the terror its whiteness evokes in him, are brought to mind as well. And the reader is alerted to what is to come (“The Skiers” is Intruder’s literal and figurative center) by the prefatory poem, “Demon Lover,” an allusion to Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” where a like woman “wail[s] for her demon lover.” Here Bialosky begins with an italicized question, meaning it’s being asked by an Other, and closes with a near-koan about the nature of desire, which can intrude into our lives as an angel or its opposite: “Will you stay with me? / I won’t leave, she said. /”I must go now.”
Another question arises: where do we find the lines between angel and demon, madness and mystery? Bialosky clearly has both human feet planted on dry, non-slippery ground, being a wife, mother, teacher, and editor at W. W. Norton. And yet her elusive, subtly erudite work as a poet transports her to another realm entirely. In fact, there’s an aura of dissociation in many poems in Intruder, with Bialosky referring to herself as “The Poet,” particularly in those poems that feature her son. But dissociation is necessarily part of motherhood, that oneness shared when the child nestled in the mother’s womb; a oneness which can also cause a sense of separation from one’s own body, not to mention from the father. In “The Poet Contemplates the Nature of Reality,” Bialosky asks “What is my life?” “For months she lost / herself in work,” she continues, “Freud said work is important / as love to the soul--and at night she sat with a boy, / forcing him to practice his violin, helping him recite his notes.” “Good boy,” says the mother in “Music is Time,” “See how hard you have to be on yourself? / How will your violin know who you are / unless you make it speak?” Perhaps most poignantly--and universally--this theme is further explored in “Rules of Contact,” which takes place at a Little League game and addresses not only the relation between mother and son, but also its inevitable disruption: “My son won’t let me kiss him anymore, / a mother in the bleachers cries.” These are some of the most psychologically astute poems about being a mother, and especially about being the mother of a son, since Plath’s.
Bialosky says, in the interview previously mentioned, that she’s “got to quit writing about snow!” But as someone who has lived half her life in states containing all four of America’s poisonous serpents (rattlers, cottonmouths, copperheads, and coral snakes, not to mention snapping turtles and clouds not of snow but rapacious, maddening and/ or downright painful stinging insects), and in whose own poems snakes seem to be a constant, if unconsciously rendered, subject, I’m reminded of Hamlet’s remark about his father’s ghost: hic et ubique.
What’s here and everywhere is here and everywhere. So let’s hope she doesn’t keep her resolution. Too many Bialosky poems of the rich and strange variety have emanated from snow, whether in Cleveland, New York, or Colorado.
(first published in HARVARD REVIEW)
Aiken’s hometown and final resting place, Savannah, doesn’t receive much snow, unlike Cleveland, Ohio, and this particular form of precipitation flurries and blizzards throughout the work of native daughter Jill Bialosky. “Fathers in the Snow” is one of the most powerful poems in her first collection, THE END OF DESIRE; her first novel is titled HOUSE UNDER SNOW; last April, for POETRY DAILY’s series of National Poetry Month features, she published a commentary on Stevens’ “The Snow Man”; and INTRUDER, her newest volume of poems, contains several works--perhaps most notably the non-rhyming, decasyllabic sonnet sequence, “The Skiers”--in which snow joins the dramatis personae who comprise INTRUDER.
Bialosky has said in an interview--which begins with a long question about the way snow acts as a leitmotif in her work, with asides concerning Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and the snow-blotched appearance of the cover--that “a snow-filled mountain is almost a character in the poem.” Shelley’s “Mont Blanc,” and the terror its whiteness evokes in him, are brought to mind as well. And the reader is alerted to what is to come (“The Skiers” is Intruder’s literal and figurative center) by the prefatory poem, “Demon Lover,” an allusion to Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” where a like woman “wail[s] for her demon lover.” Here Bialosky begins with an italicized question, meaning it’s being asked by an Other, and closes with a near-koan about the nature of desire, which can intrude into our lives as an angel or its opposite: “Will you stay with me? / I won’t leave, she said. /”I must go now.”
Another question arises: where do we find the lines between angel and demon, madness and mystery? Bialosky clearly has both human feet planted on dry, non-slippery ground, being a wife, mother, teacher, and editor at W. W. Norton. And yet her elusive, subtly erudite work as a poet transports her to another realm entirely. In fact, there’s an aura of dissociation in many poems in Intruder, with Bialosky referring to herself as “The Poet,” particularly in those poems that feature her son. But dissociation is necessarily part of motherhood, that oneness shared when the child nestled in the mother’s womb; a oneness which can also cause a sense of separation from one’s own body, not to mention from the father. In “The Poet Contemplates the Nature of Reality,” Bialosky asks “What is my life?” “For months she lost / herself in work,” she continues, “Freud said work is important / as love to the soul--and at night she sat with a boy, / forcing him to practice his violin, helping him recite his notes.” “Good boy,” says the mother in “Music is Time,” “See how hard you have to be on yourself? / How will your violin know who you are / unless you make it speak?” Perhaps most poignantly--and universally--this theme is further explored in “Rules of Contact,” which takes place at a Little League game and addresses not only the relation between mother and son, but also its inevitable disruption: “My son won’t let me kiss him anymore, / a mother in the bleachers cries.” These are some of the most psychologically astute poems about being a mother, and especially about being the mother of a son, since Plath’s.
Bialosky says, in the interview previously mentioned, that she’s “got to quit writing about snow!” But as someone who has lived half her life in states containing all four of America’s poisonous serpents (rattlers, cottonmouths, copperheads, and coral snakes, not to mention snapping turtles and clouds not of snow but rapacious, maddening and/ or downright painful stinging insects), and in whose own poems snakes seem to be a constant, if unconsciously rendered, subject, I’m reminded of Hamlet’s remark about his father’s ghost: hic et ubique.
What’s here and everywhere is here and everywhere. So let’s hope she doesn’t keep her resolution. Too many Bialosky poems of the rich and strange variety have emanated from snow, whether in Cleveland, New York, or Colorado.
(first published in HARVARD REVIEW)
June 22, 2019
Not the worst poetry I've read, but nothing special about it either. A lot of poems about family relationships, childhood hobbies (violin lessons, little league baseball), and lovers. Bialosky uses lackluster dialogue far too frequently, almost as a crutch to push the narratives forward. I'm also not a big fan of how often she uses rhetorical questions. The overall effect is that her poetry is quite conversational and it trivializes any great ideas it tries to introduce. The middle section is a long series about the titular intruder, who skis across a mountain full of snow, wind, and wild birds. The imagery here is decent but the series is so repetitive.
Poems that I liked:
"The Dream," "The Listener," "Lift Your Head, Speak."
Poems that I liked:
"The Dream," "The Listener," "Lift Your Head, Speak."
March 16, 2010
Jill Bialosky, Intruder (Knopf, 2008)
I read Jill Bialosky's The End of Desire a few years back, and found it enjoyable enough if rough around the edges. Reading Intruder, I was ready to proclaim that the edges had been smoothed out and Bialosky had really found her voice here. Then I got to the fifth section of the book, and it all came back.
“This is how she imagines it. A stillness.
He enters the room and is not afraid.
Once the poet watched a fence being torn down
picket by picket. It was white and surrounded a garden....”
(“The Poet Contemplates the Sunflowers”)
I've talked in myriad reviews about how some folks believe that if you chop anything up into little lines you can call it poetry. Bialosky isn't even chopping it up into little lines; that's declarative prose, right there, with the only line breaks meant to keep something of the uniform about length. Is it good? Bad? I'll leave that to the individual reader to decide, but one thing it isn't is poetry.
Thankfully, the fifth section is only one section of the book, and the rest of it is much more poetic, as well as being a lot more polished.
“She was in her kitchen,
with the cool blue impenetrable quiet
she had craved and she remembered
the excursion of his warm hand
on her skin, the idea of a family
he had embodied...”
(“The End of Love”)
Feel how much more languid that is, how much freer-flowing? (Though that “and” in the third line could have been dispensed with; it jags.) Most of the book is like this, and that is a good thing. Worth checking out of the library to see if you want a copy on your shelf. ***
I read Jill Bialosky's The End of Desire a few years back, and found it enjoyable enough if rough around the edges. Reading Intruder, I was ready to proclaim that the edges had been smoothed out and Bialosky had really found her voice here. Then I got to the fifth section of the book, and it all came back.
“This is how she imagines it. A stillness.
He enters the room and is not afraid.
Once the poet watched a fence being torn down
picket by picket. It was white and surrounded a garden....”
(“The Poet Contemplates the Sunflowers”)
I've talked in myriad reviews about how some folks believe that if you chop anything up into little lines you can call it poetry. Bialosky isn't even chopping it up into little lines; that's declarative prose, right there, with the only line breaks meant to keep something of the uniform about length. Is it good? Bad? I'll leave that to the individual reader to decide, but one thing it isn't is poetry.
Thankfully, the fifth section is only one section of the book, and the rest of it is much more poetic, as well as being a lot more polished.
“She was in her kitchen,
with the cool blue impenetrable quiet
she had craved and she remembered
the excursion of his warm hand
on her skin, the idea of a family
he had embodied...”
(“The End of Love”)
Feel how much more languid that is, how much freer-flowing? (Though that “and” in the third line could have been dispensed with; it jags.) Most of the book is like this, and that is a good thing. Worth checking out of the library to see if you want a copy on your shelf. ***
October 2, 2011
My favorite here was "Dreaming of Two World Coexisting in Harmony" because she was having some fun there. I found a few of these to be repeats: hitting the same tone, language, subject, POV, topic several times in the volume so that it felt one-note. I liked the "Intimacies" sequence, especially "Family Vacation": "the one-armed man, what casualty befalls him?" and "The dog of some uncertain pedigree/ digs his paws into the sand."
February 3, 2009
This was a good collection of poems. There were a few experiments in structure that didn't really work, and the poem about surfers was such a juvenile theme that it really didn't belong with the rest of her work here. She is at her best when teetering between abstract and concrete, every day and surreal.
September 2, 2014
An excellent collection of poems.
Read
November 14, 2015it got weaker towards the end, but still some lovely words.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews