I think it’s best to begin this series of book reviews with a negative review as it’s usually easier to distance yourself from an idea than to try to relate to a dozen. I’ll begin with Matthea Harvey’s Pity the Bathtub its Forced Embrace of the Human Form.

Matthea Harvey’s poetry is impressive. She is obviously skilled, but her poems are intellectual counterfeit money. Despite her best efforts the poems strike only harmonious emotional strings with a focus on kitschy language techniques. At no point is there a threat of change, at no point do these poems challenge the reader and that is what makes them mostly forgettable.

The poems seem to suffer from a need to be beautiful, or worse cute, but my main complaint is that the poems are obvious and finite. The closing lines of the title poem might explain. After a short narrative about some men, women and bathtubs Harvey offers:

To define ourselves against even if we know that/Whenever we want we can pull the plug and get out/Which is not the case with our own tighter confinementInside the body oh pity the bathtub but pity us too

If that poem were presented on a three fold presentation board she might have pasted “Conclusion” over those lines. Harvey’s sometimes compelling scenes and deft control of language are needlessly punctuated with these ridiculous interpretative statements. We are told what to take away from the poem, leaving no room for expansion.

Harey runs sentences together and her fans seem to love the idea that you can end a clause and begin another with the same words. This is impressive in a very small sense and it certainly doesn’t make up for the sentimentality and narrative dullness in this collection.

Her technique of run-on connections, made through line breaks and disfigured sentence structures, works best when pulling two disparate subjects together. She’ll end a line and then start another by using the last word of the previous line. Think of the “Miss Lucy” songs from grade school- “Miss Lucy sat upon it and she cut her big fat… Ask me no more questions…”

In this collection at least, she never really makes any brave connections. Her poems are narrative in a very old sense and lyrical content, rather than coming out of the work, has to be read into it.

David Orr in the Times wrote that Harvey’s style is…

“a variation on the trendiest contemporary style, which relies heavily on disconnected phrases, abrupt syntactical shifts, attention-begging titles (“The Gem Is on Page Sixty-Four”), quirky diction (“orangery,” “aigrettes”), flickering italics, oddball openings (“The scent of pig is faint tonight”) and a tone ranging from daffy to plangent.”

I can’t find fault with the accuracy of that description, and if good poetry should beg for attention and pride itself on being quirky then this collection would be among the best. The fact that this uninventive and trivial kind of poetry has enjoyed positive critical reception is bewildering.