[In the following review, Ryan asserts that the farm life depicted in Katzenleben is not idyllic, but rather oppressive and cumulatively “tiresome.”]

Idylls have always had their dangers, and the “cats' lives” of Kirsch's title poem [from Katzenleben] are not the comfortable snoozes they might seem. The image is an emblem of the farm life that forms the subject of the collection. Beginning before the onset of winter, the cycle follows the year through until the next fall. Like farm life itself, the poems are full of little things: plant and animal life, subtle changes in weather. The ultimate effect, however, is not that of lovingly detailed descriptions; rather, the multiplicity of observations brings with it a kind of horror: pain at the need for laborious notation, distress at the elusiveness of all distinctions, alarm at the slightest change in the tiniest object. Sometimes one sees things too clearly for comfort: “One could distinguish precisely / which of the remaining leaves / moved a little in front / or behind another.”

“Mild Alarm,” the poem from which the foregoing quotation is drawn, defines a mood that imbues the collection as a whole. Cats are first mentioned, not in the title poem, but in an account of newborn kittens falling to their death from the hayloft: “after the first death the farmer puts / straw beneath the hatch the gray siblings / at their mother's belly take over / the teat left by the trailblazer their chances / of survival have risen with a bound.” Such wordplays are evidently meant to heighten the sense of unease pervading this landscape, but they are not always successful. More skillfully handled are the enjambments, which repeatedly create disjuncture between subject and verb, the almost total lack of punctuation, which allows connections forward and backward, and the general sluggishness of the verse, which moves its heavy clusters of nouns at glacial speed, like the seemingly interminable winter that dominates a major part of the sequence.

Over the long haul these effects become tiring and even tiresome; but at their best they convey very well the close oppressiveness and malignant stagnation that is the other face of this country idyll. Kirsch's poem on her grandfather's pastor suggests, however, that much of this unease may itself be an illusion. Here the pastor's upright gait is seen as a distorted reflection in a globular glass garden ornament. The eye, the imagination, words themselves play tricks. These poems may at times show frightening transformations of apparently harmless realities, but are these effects not perhaps somewhat forced?