Celestial Timepiece: A Joyce Carol Oates Home Page

Tenderness

by Joyce Carol Oates

Princeton: Ontario Review Press, 1996

91 pages

Dust Jacket Blurb

When Joyce Carol Oates published her first collection of poems, Anonymous Sins, in 1969, the reviewers, who had long recognized her talent as a writer of prose fiction, were quick to see that she was equally talented as a poet. "At the very least, Miss Oates is a major writer," stated Library Journal; "she may even be a great one."

Anonymous Sins was followed over the next two decades by six more volumes, each of them more than comfirming the original estimate of the poet. Tenderness, her eighth volume, is a generous selection of fifty-seven poems written during the past eight years. Most of them have been previously published in literary journals and magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, Boulevard, Gettysburg Review, The New Yorker, and TriQuarterly.

The poems gathered here range from the lyric to the narrative and satiric, from a glimpse into childhood ("O Crayola!") to a woman's recollections of her adolescent experiences with men ("Sexy" and "Flirtation, July 1953"), from an epiphany in a supermarket ("Tenderness") to sardonic reflections on an American obsession ("$") and a chilling dramatic monologue by a convicted sex offender ("Like Walking to the Drug Store, When I Get Out"). Joyce Carol Oates is at the height of her powers here.

Excerpt

Nostalgia

Rural District School #7, Ransomville, New York

Crumbling stone steps of the old schoolhouse
Boarded-up windows shards of winking glass
Built 1898, numerals faint in stone as shadow
Through a window, obedient rows of desks mute
Only a droning of hornets beneath the eaves,
the cries of red-winged blackbirds by the creek

How many generations of this rocky countryside grown & gone
How many memories & all forgotten
no one to chronicle, no regret

& the schoolhouse soon to be razed & goodbye America
The flagless pole, what relief!
I love it, the eye lifting skyward to nothing
Never to pledge allegiance to the United States of America
again
Never to press my flat right hand over my heart again
as if I had one

Reviews

Library Journal, September 1, 1996, p182
Publisher's Weekly, September 30, 1996, p84
Houston Chronicle, November 10, 1996, Z21

I. TENDERNESS

O Crayola!
Glimpsed from a Car, Quickly Passing
In Blue Nantucket
Flirtation, July 1953
The Thin Rain
Nightmare, So Sweet
The Bullfrogs
Off-Season
On This Morning of Grief
Once Upon a Time
Sexy
Tenderness

II. UNDERTOW

Prenatal
Island, 1949
Lost Creek
The Stone Well
Marsena Sportsmen's Club, 1957
Child Walking in Sleep
Snapshot Album
Undertow, Wolf's Head Lake
The Infant's Wake
Recurring Dream of Childhood
Flash Flood
Rise Up, O Men of God
Elegy: The Ancestors
The Lord Is My Shepherd I Shall Not Want
Nostalgia

III. WHAT IS MOST AMERICAN IS MOST IN MOTION

$
Orion
Recollection, in Tranquility
Insomnia
He Was Talking About His Friend
Hands, Prints, Time: A Collage
Upstairs
There Was a Shot
The Black Glove: A Rapture
American Holiday
Like Walking to the Drugstore, When I Geta Out
Ballad of Ashfield Avenue
What Is Most American Is Most in Motion
Dakota Mystery, 10 May 1994
Frequent Flier I
Frequent Flier II

IV. IN THE COUNTRY OF THE BLUE

The Riddle
Motive, Metaphor
Burning Oak, November
The Insomniac
Old Concord Cemetery
Summer Squall, Monhegan Island
Hermit Crab
George Bellows' "Mrs. T. in Cream Silk, No. 1" (1919-23)
The Triumph of Gravity
Immobility Defense
To an Aged Cat Dying in My Arms
I Am Krishna, Destroyer of Worlds
Such Beauty!
In the Country of the Blue

Page address:
http://jco.usfca.edu/works/poetry/tenderness.html


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