Lisa Jarnot, Joie
De Vivre: Selected Poems 1992-2012
(City Lights, Spotlight Series, No. 9)
City Lights Editor Garrett Caples has done a marvelous job
curating the Spotlight Series, the SF press’ state-of-the-genre contemporary equivalent
to their counter-cultural identifying Pocket Poets Series. Lisa Jarnot’s Joie De Vivre is an excellent career-to-date selection from the Brooklyn-based poet’s first four books, capturing her musical, pastoral,
wide-eyed, animally (ok, not a word) lyricism. I was delighted to find some of my personal
favorites republished here (including “What I Want to Do” from Night Songs, “Song of the Chinchilla” and a worthy heap of “Sea
Lyrics” from Ring of Fire, the lean balladry of Black Dog Songs' “Greyhound Ode”). Perhaps the most pleasant
surprise, though, is the generous helping of visual poetry and Stein- and
Buffalo-inspired prose poems from Jarnot’s Some Other Kind of Mission, her 1992 debut from Burning Deck. These early pieces reveal
a tougher, though no less musical, side to Jarnot’s oeuvre. The book ends with a selection of new work, including “Amedillin
Cooperative Nosegay”, a dazzling 16-page
finale that recalls the final day-dream montage of An American in Paris. David Henderson writes of the poem's “crescendo resolution, (as) the expanse
of her well-earned landscape becomes a realized space in proper necessity for
the scope of her delightfully unpredictable poetic." I frequently recommend
Jarnot to uninitiated-though-poetically-curious friends, and Vivre is the perfect sampling of greatest hits: the joyous, generousness of Jarnot’s everyday heraldry is fully on
display here.
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Please check back throughout the month of December as I continue to count down my favorite poetry titles of 2014.
