Alice Fulton | Reviews of Palladium

Excerpts from Reviews of Palladium

University of Illinois Press, 1986
Winner of the National Poetry Series 1985 and Society of Midland Authors Award 1985

“Fulton revels in her findings, in the artisan’s sense of the the term, and the poems in Palladium are prepossessing and formidable ... her work is remarkable for its flamboyant diction, the wide range and acute particularity and vibrant color of it.... Because of Fulton’s energy and passion for specificity, there is hardly a dead line. What most of these poems testify to so energetically is the power of ‘expansion’ — the movement from some kind of constriction to some kind of freedom.... In addition to meditations and the dramatic monologues and portraits, there are compressed lyrics ... all among the best things in this very impressive volume. Fulton’s second book augurs the arrival of an exceptional poet.”

Stephen Yenser
The Yale Review

“Fulton struts verbal skills that lesser poets would envy. Her ear for sound valences ... insures that whatever she produces will have some way of delighting us.... Palladium is a collection to own and explore; like its namesake metal, it will not tarnish at ordinary temperatures.”

Sven Birkerts
Boston Review

“The words here sparkle with interest, both for their sounds and for their meanings... It is not just subject matter that insists here that language gives substantial meaning to reality. Fulton’s style has so much texture, thanks to her images and to her use of words, and that texture places a palpable surface on the abstract construct of the poem ... Hardwon and solid ...”

Peter Stitt
The Georgia Review

“These are compressed poems of great texture and inventiveness, sometimes puzzling, sometimes dazzling in their wit and unpredictable, wildly heterogenous combinations. Her style is resonant with a recurring theme of the book, that of the ‘distracting plenitude’ of the society we live in. Fulton’s verbal scope and energy, constantly juxtaposing the commercial and scientific with the mythic and divine, steadily refuse to separate the worldly from the otherworldly.”

The Virginia Quarterly Review

“Many a volume is more impressive in its parts than as a whole ... Palladium, Alice Fulton’s brilliant new collection, is a happy exception.... The imagination is held as supernal value in her poems, and its chief delight and glory is language — language that, in transforming itself, transforms the world ... Etymology breeds metaphor; palladium generates the imagery and energy of the poems, informing them all without necessarily intruding upon them. The organizing principle of an Alice Fulton poem allows for cohesiveness yet is not so narrow or restrictive as to inhibit the flow of associations and ideas. It’s as though the world itself were endowed with a centrifugal force, enabling the poet to branch out in numerous directions — parallel lines that manage to intersect on their separate paths to infinity.”

David Lehman
Epoch

[Fulton has] “a profound sense of the way surface and substance, style and content, coexist and are often at odds with one another.... It’s the unexpected which so fully permeates Fulton’s poetry and makes it such a pleasure to read — the astonishing line breaks which tease out the double meanings of words and phrases ...; the mimetic sounds; and the similitudes which are at once piercingly accurate and at the same time able to join two entities most of us never would have connected.... Like Wallace Stevens, Fulton understands one of the meanings of ‘poverty’ as emotional and imaginative dearth. Himself accused of verbal excess in his first book, Stevens knew why his mind needed those exotic French words to survive, just as Fulton knows the necessity of her own eccentric turns of phrase. Most of the poems in Palladium may draw us in with their unfamiliar tone, but suddenly we realize that they are radically altering our perceptions of the world, and one can't ask more than that of poetry.”

Charles Wasserburg
The Borders Review

“... every poem in Palladium shares this: an utter intolerance for superficial observation. Fulton’s integrity lies in her unwillingness to accept conventional wisdoms. She looks at the world — and herself — with the unending honesty and humor of a sage. Her penetrating eye and her enlightening language drive her poems far beyond expected limits.”

Matthew Gilbert
The Boston Herald

“... her guiding genius is Marianne Moore. Although Fulton’s exuberance is not as strictly controlled as Moore’s, it could be argued that the great Modernist’s elaborate syllabic forms were disguises for a chaos of associations. Like Moore’s poems, which she called her ‘things,' Fulton’s poems are also things, rather amazing ones, too.”

Mark Jarman
The Hudson Review

“Growing up in the unforgiveably ugly industrial city of Troy, New York, perhaps accounts for Fulton’s ability to depict the spooky violence and the relentless, neon hard sell of contemporary life. She also details the pitfalls of the Yuppie generation: predictable marriages, boring business conventions, and commercialized religion. Fulton is scrupulously honest. The poems are heavily detailed, the language rich and suprising, and the book itself highly structured.”

M.P. White
Choice

“This poet’s like a natural force ... a source of energy. I hope it powers many more books.”

J.D. McClatchy
Poetry

“... her lingistic skills keep the dazzling objects under control: the spinning baton thrills but lands firmly back in the expert hand.”

Booklist

“Fulton’s new poems ... embody the principle of poetry as an act of discovery.... The diction that pulls off so many feats of magic ranges from high to low, densely poetic to colloquial, and is a wonder of its own.... Fulton has received substantial recognition within the literary community, and this book should establish her among the poetry-reading public as an important young writer.”

Publisher’s Weekly

“Spinning verbal velocity...breathless with rifts and uphill charges ... affectionate wit ...irreverence ... both manic and purposeful ... (the poems) take on an almost mythic weight, the camera working its rise until suddenly it’s not our little jigsaw puzzle, but the full works we're dreaming.”

Marianne Boruch
American Poetry Review

“... Energetic and novel ... with a wicked intelligence ... Fulton is capable of piercing and disinterested contemplation.”

Calvin Bedient
Sewanee Review

Recent Poems Online

Barely Composed at these Booksellers