The Red Hour: Poems - Softcover

There is an atmosphere of wide-eyed expectation in these poems, as quickly aging speakers make desperate attempts to recoup the emotions and energy they felt in high school. They played large wind instruments in the school band; they sung in the church choir. They long for that time when the mystery of love was as inexplicable as the mystery of death. But death comes, all too suddenly and harshly, as this collection revolves around the suicide of a friend and lover. Behn ( Paper Bird ) proves herself highly adept in the use of simile and metaphor, giving already weighty subjects further depth. Musical instruments provide precise analogies: the French horn whose name "is like those kisses" and the outcast boy who plays bassoon "because bassoon, like life, was hard / No one, hardly, played it / So he was in great demand." These quotes from the beginning of poems don't begin to show Behn's ability to flawlessly push analogies to their limits. The other recurring image is that of trains: the hurricane that at its worst sounds like a train; the child watching relatives leave by train after her father's funeral. The undertone created as Behn's female voices interact with, or memorialize, various men in their lives is refreshingly sensual.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In a deft and lightly rhymed sonnet titled "Windy Popples, Late October," the poet speaks of her "ravenous need for consoling," a desire that dictates both her subjects (suicides, disabled ex-lovers) and her prescriptions for transcendence (music, sex, spirituality). Behn's is a poetry eager to separate itself from the flat musings of her contemporaries, but she relies so heavily on extended metaphors and elaborate similes that the plights of her protagonists are smothered by a zealous, awkward cleverness. Children "stand singing/ in flocks like the clumps of feathers/ you would gather in your fists," and can anyone really imagine love as "a traveled shoe/ whose sole-hole eats anything?" Behn deserves credit for trying and sometimes succeeding, but too often the strain of her effort undermines her best intentions. Recommended for larger poetry collections.
- Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, N.Y.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.