Radish King by Rebecca Loudon	by Linda Benninghoff

In Rebecca Loudon’s Radish King, the poems’ logic is mysterious; happenings in them are inexplicable. They create their own world, where a dream-like logic can operate.

In “Everyone’s Favorite Holiday Suicide: A Letter in which Violet Bick Addresses George Bailey for the Last Time” Violet Bick wants George Bailey of It’s A Wonderful Life to jump off the bridge and kill himself—an off-kilter kind of stance. The poem depicts a George Bailey contrary to the way he is portrayed in the film—as a hero, a fine, upstanding man whose life affected others’ lives for the better in many unseen, unapparent ways. Violet Bick is the woman who becomes the prostitute in the sequence of the film that shows what the world would have been like if George Bailey never existed. In the poem, she seems to believe that George Bailey took sexual advantage of her. This poem contains feminist overtones, is provocative and undermines established meanings.

The poetry’s language is spare and deft; the imagery original. Some of the poems’ images seem to come from dreams, as in “A Letter in which She Tells The Whole Truth.” The poems’ language and content often undermine established conventions for poetry.

The window is open.

A man enters as I sleep, walks

across my bed--the peach-

striped duvet, and I don’t wake.

Or he stands in my yard or sits

in a car parked a block away.

This poem begins with happenings that are fairly ordinary. Then the stalker appears and blots out these images and the ordinary day is filled with terror. The ending of “A Letter in which She Tells The Whole Truth” is mysterious and doesn‘t seem related to the rest of the poem.

if this is what you intended,

then yes, you have achieved

breathless.

The ending seems to fall back to the theme of language itself. In this case, and in others, the poems topple the readers’ cues as to what the poem is about. The poems are delicately balanced worlds which can be read again and again in a process of discovery.

Questions or Comments for Artvoice? Send e-mail to editorial@artvoice.com • Article last modified 8/8/2007 Issue Navigation> Issue Index > v6n32: All the City's a Stage (8/9/07) > Book Reviews > Radish King by Rebecca Loudon This Week's Issue • Artvoice Daily • Events Calendar • Classifieds