There's some incredibly intelligent, emotive lines to be read in 19 Varieties of Gazelle ("They know there are countries where men and women kiss in the streets, where a man's hand on a woman's knee does not mean an earthquake" from "Goint to the Spring" is absolutely brilliant), but Naomi Shihab Nye's poetry isn't really my style. She's immensely talented, and I'm not knocking her for writing about what she loves to write, although the caveat here is that I just don't really empathize with Nye's stories. It isn't that I don't enjoy slice-of-life poetry - in fact, a frequently thumbed through collection of Mark Doty's poetry sits right in between the Kurt Cobain poster and an unused bottle of hairspray (should I ever feel like fauxhawking it up, I guess) in my dorm room, and Doty's essentially made a living out of writing concise prose about daily lives - but that the poetry in 19 Varieties of Gazelle all, for the most part, has a distinctive bent that I don't particularly relate with, because my heart and emotions and soul are different than the characters Nye portrays in her collection. With that said, as an Italian-American with great respect to his roots and to his family ties, I totally understand and get Nye's relatively universalized anecdotes (the middle eastern trappings could easily be replaced with American or Italian shadings without changing the meaning of her poetry all that much), although family, geneaology, roots - all of those - are not nearly as important to me as they are to Nye. I think I also have a slight problem with how the entire collection, aside from the introductory poem "Flinn, on the Bus," is explicitly about Nye's middle eastern ties. Would it be a terrible thing for me to say, although it would've been counter-intuitive to Nye's point, that I think I would've enjoyed the collection more if she varied the themes of her poetry to the point where it wasn't even a themed collection anymore? Although I get the feeling Nye is an incredibly versatile poet, given the different styles she writes with in 19 Varieties of Gazelle (just look at the structure of each poem - she plays with form quite often, and I have to compliment meant her on how well her language seems to complement the words being said throughout) the divergences in styles aren't enough to spark my interest too much because the poem's themes are all relatively similar to one another. However, because I generally prefer lyrics and surrealistic poetry to the type of poetry Nye specializes in, my opinion should certainly be taken with an enormous grain of salt.
