Apology for Want

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by Mary Jo Bang

University Press of New England

Due/Published August 1997, 80 pages, paper

ISBN 0874518229

There is a keenness in the poems of Apology for Want that one rarely encounters in a first collection, an unfailing and unflinching exactitude - of language, of metaphor, of emotion. Mary Jo Bang is a poet of unerring discernment, of uncanny perspicacity. The precision in these poems is never gratuitous; this is fine furniture where every nail is driven by necessity. Bang delineates the all-too-human condition of gazing and longing and gives us cautionary tales of what happens to those who shun restraint and yield instead to desperate attempts at satisfaction.

Review

Mary Jo Bang won the 1996 Katherine Bakeless Nason Poetry Prize. Former Chicagoan Mary Jo Bang's poems are taut, quick poems, with no excess language. Her topics range from the mythological (Persephone) to the medical (a doctor lancing a drug addict's abcess), with desire an overriding theme. These carefully crafted poems stand up to repeated readings, and reveal more levels, more between the lines, with each reading.