Temper

Tempered by silence and grappling for meaning beyond story, beyond what is spoken or known, these poems recall absences everywhere—the losses by which we are plagued, what we must endure.

Restraint and abandon ride side-by-side through these fiercely distilled poems—again and again they bear reluctant witness to the shadows hovering around the edges of every moment. A beautiful unease suffuses these poems—they make me aware I'm alive, and certain of nothing. A stunning debut.

In its clarity of voice-stark, startling and objective-Temper reminds me of Louise Gluck's First Born. Bachmann works the charged margins of the mythic imagination, but with a terrifying difference. For her, myth is also fact: a murdered sister, an accused father, and an inconsolable mother. A marvelous, compelling, and disquieting addition to contemporary poetry.

An often haunting image of time juttering forward and back ceaselessly, lives never completely explained or tragedy never finally understood.

The difficulties of making art about violence might have churned the poems into melodrama or diffused them into abstraction, but Bachmann's temperate approach yields work that is eerily calm and anything but bloodless. Tough and impressive, 'Temper' leaves its mark.

In her lush economies, psychic darkness, and imperative forthrightness, Bachmann is clearly an heir of Louise Gluck and there's a trace of Whitman here, too . . . The grief in 'Temper' is raw, relentless, and unadorned; in the crucible of Bachmann's sensibility, this sorrow becomes gracious force.

Nothing short of a stunning debut. Rarely have I felt so compelled by a collection, so utterly incapable of turning away.

A thorough and vivid emotional narrative, taking the reader to an unsettling depth of personal tragedy at breakneck speed.

Here we have metamorphosis, resonance, transfromation, the alchemy of art. Bachmann is able by a few simple direct gestures . . . to connect her personal grief and tragedy to the whole tradition of English (and Western) verse and to the poetic impulse itself to make beauty out of sorrow.