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Reviews
Jill Hoffman's second volume of poems, Black Diaries, brings together poems published in a wide variety of magazines and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Partisan Review, and Roth's Poetry Annual. The editor of Mudfish, Hoffman has taught at Bard, Barnard, and Brooklyn College, and currently teaches out of her home. Aptly titled, the poems in this collection have the compact, unguarded, transgressive language of a relationship diary. Most explore erotic feelings and disclose both the tangles of desire and the scouring, complicated wounds that mark us, as in the brief "Regret":
Mother, when I dress him The danger of confessional poetry is that of aggrandizement and indirect ambition, and this collection is not wholly free of this. However, the expressionist lurch of Hoffman's syntax and imagery redeems what might have been lost to vanity. I found myself thinking of the hidden surfaces Rodin left buried when he worked two figures out of a stone, of the surfaces opened up between two people when they have touched, in which there is not articulation but a dense unfinished possibility. And I found myself thinking of the way honesty is often effected by the application of a tourniquet, as in the poem "2 Oct" which Hoffman begins in adumbration:
Laundry. Recipes. Mice. My daughter And ends with precise, disparate description:
At dawn we swim in the pool of the college that fired me. This balance of clean decision and difficult feeling is, finally, thrilling.
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