Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Oates, Joyce Carol (Vol. 15) - Paul Zweig

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PAUL ZWEIG

Joyce Carol Oates's imagination runs to violent extremes [in "Women Whose Lives Are Food, Men Whose Lives Are Money"]: a pack of snarling wild dogs; or the monologue of a dead woman dragged out of a river; a man having a heart attack; or, in one of the book's stronger poems, a flooding river tearing the dead out of the cemetery earth in a soggy dark resurrection. Violence is not so much the subject of those poems as it is their element. A groundswell of violent images carries the reader, and often dazzles him, until the poems seem like segments of a stream of language; a stream whose direction is often unclear, and when it is clear is often not as interesting as the flow itself…. [In the poem "Guilt" the] scene is vivid, yet austere. The cumulative pulsing of images resembles the icy flow of the stream itself. Yet the poem does not fulfill the strength of these lines, for when Miss Oates begins to moralize the scene she becomes curiously thin, even...

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1. Introduction
2. Charlotte Goodman
3. Greg Johnson
4. Maureen Howard
5. Paul Zweig
6. A. G. Mojtabai
7. Edward Guereschi
8. Copyright

1. Joyce Carol Oates