The Descent of Alette (Penguin Poets)

I would put this book in my top ten favorites. It has great imagery, deep themes, and I'm still thinking about it years after reading it for the first time. I'm overdue for a re-read!

The tyrant owns form, doesn’t he? This is a book for anyone who might be no one, or anyone who is worried, or anyone who has ever thought about women, epic poetry, or both.

This book was very challenging to read because everything was written in quotations however, it was intriguing as a different way of writing poetry.

Loved the gritty, visceral language and the epic nature of this poem. Notely blows me away -- the loss of memory, the tangled and eternal subway, the owls and masks.

Brilliant, lucid, engaging and brave, a feminist chthonic journey shimmering with poetic bravado.

Let me start with this: The Descent of Alette is difficult to read at first. Notley "puts quotation marks around" "groups of words" "in lines" "that can be off-putting." Note that I'm not quoting from the book there, just giving an example of what the book's text appears like. This forces us to read more slowly, taking in each line a few words at a time. What appears to be awkward is in fact a great solution to the speed-reading most of us do these days. That being said, it's troublesome for the first few poems, less so after that, virtually invisible by the end of the first section.When talking about this book, I immediately compare it to Dante's Divine Comedy, and I commonly see others do the same (see an earlier review here on Amazon.com). Exchange Hell for a subway, and you've basically got it: an underground realm ruled over by a Tyrant, poor souls being tortured, though in this case there is no indication that they have done anything to deserve it. Notley's language might not be quite as beautiful/harsh as Dante's, but her images stand with anything he created. After introducing two characters on a subway, a woman and her baby, both on fire, Notley writes:"another woman" "in uniform" "from above ground""entered" "the train" "She was fireproof" "she wore gloves, & she""took" "the baby" "took the baby" "away from the""mother" "Extracted" "the burning baby" "From the fire" "theymade together" "But the baby" "still burned"("But not yours" "It didn't happen" "to you")"We don't know yet" "if it will" "stop burning,""said the uniformed" "woman" "The burning woman" "was crying""she made a form" "in her mind" "an imaginary" "form" "tosettle" "in her arms where" "the baby" "had been" "We sawher fiery arms" "cradle the air" "She cradled air" ("They take yourchildren" "away" "if you"re on fire")"In the air that" "she cradled" "it seemed to us there" "floated""a flower-like" "a red flower" "its petals" "curling flames""She cradled" "seemed to cradle" "the burning flower of" "herself gone""her life" ("She saw" "whatever she saw, but what we saw" "was that flower")After surviving the horrors of the subway, Alette goes even deeper underground, passing through a series of psychological challenges that at times seem straight out of Freud, at times out of Classical mythology, at times out of collective dreams. Throughout it all, we learn more and more about Alette, who is not just a "hero" who goes through the motions necessary to the plot, but who considers and stumbles and is confused and learns.The third section of the book is a rebirth, wherein Alette finds a source for a stronger power than the Tyrant's, and it is distinctly feminist in its nature. I need to note here for those who react to feminism in a knee-jerk way: Notley's feminism is not a militant feminism, though it requires brief "military" action on Alette's part. Men are helpful in the story, have purpose besides being the bad guy. If anything, what Notley attacks in the form of the Tyrant is the idea of a corrupt masculinity, a kind of Big Brother who would easily stand as an antagonist in any number of 20th/21st century literary works. Alette's feminism is the discovery of her place in the world, and that place is not slaving away mindlessly for the Tyrant, not acting as just a womb or pair of hands or pretty face. It's a nuanced message, despite the epic (and therefore presumably black-and-white) nature of the whole book.The fourth section is the showdown with the Tyrant, a great deal of philosophizing, and an ending that I actually find more satisfying than that of Paradiso. I won't spoil it here, but it just works extremely well in conjunction with the themes of Descent as a whole.If you want to be challenged, if you want to think deep thoughts, if you want surreality and magic, pick up The Descent of Alette. For even more interesting reading from the author and her partner, you could also turn to The Scarlet Cabinet, which contains but actually predates the on-its-own publication of Descent.

I have a complicated relationship with most of the books I've read by Alice Notley. I admire her facility with the lyric, her ability to get just beneath a concept or sentiment using a very talk-y style so that I always feel like I'm with whatever speaker she's using, inside that mind and her mind all at once. This is a good kind of complication. It's one I yearn for with poems.The unpleasant complications are when I feel as though I'm just being subjected to her unedited notebook entries. Too much, too much, too much. It comes up especially with her book Mysteries of Small Houses.I mention these difficulties only to sharpen the accomplishment of The Descent of Alette. Like other reviewers, I feel the tonal similarities to Dante's Inferno. Which becomes a subversive allusion considering Alette seeks after a male Tyrant in order to destroy him, while Dante sought after his Beatrice out of desire. But I read and reread Alette, because Notley continually subverts patriarchal conventions in the book.I actually find I crave the speaker's intellect, and the mythic logic that gives the book its arc. I want it more. Yes, there are quotations around each fragment in the poems. I actually appreciate them for slowing my reading down, and for sharpening my focus on the use of Notley's language. And it's not just a stylistic tic, or something to be endured. It could actually be described as further subversion of The Tyrant Alette pursues.

The Descent of Alette is, for me, already a classic and one well worth reading. Published over a decade ago, the interrogation of Alette--its form, its opacity, its potential sociopolitical and feminist engagement--have generated rich debates and excellent scholarship. But it is not that I want to laud this book for its capacity to incite reaction, or because it is so vey smart and formally intense. Rather, I simply love this book--its music, its intrigue, its sense of desperate gritty search that we can all relate to. I return to Alette every once and awhile--sometimes getting caught back up and sucked in from start to finish, sometimes just dipping in for a few poems and pages, for a moment along the ride--down deep in the belly of the underground filled with animalia and a sense of struggle or a momentary connection between these characters and voices. I relish in a second of transformation or the possibility of that possibility and how Notley carries me close to it. This is "poetry at its finest", as they say--it is alive, painful, beautiful, real.

A wonderfully unusual yet powerful writing style.