A little book of meat

new & selected poems

Plot

From Booklist These poems in the voice of a sheltered woman raised by a staunchly Catholic mother on a backwoods British cattle ranch tell a feverish love story in sensual, dreamlike images. Physical yearning dominates the tone from the book's first poem, which flatly states "Lust's the answer" and sets the stage for the entrance of a stranger. The woman fantasizes getting this man's attention by building strategic little piles of sugar cubes, bantams' eggs, and cubes of cattle-cake along his route. Elsewhere she asks the blood-spattered, traveling slaughterman, "Do you think, like me, you must not think?" When he leaves, she misses him and desperately wishes for peace--"to be a cow . . . a cargo of grass, a hammock of soupy milk." This narrator in her "world of cows insane with longing" is compellingly readable. Whitney Scott