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Book Reviews

DaDaDa by Catherine Daly

isbn 1 876857 95 1

Published By Salt Publishing

Ms Daly also brings in cultural references that only someone who was formed in the 1980’s and 90’s could. “fuck me pumps” for example is a line that anyone who went to college in the 1980’s gets and when it sits next to a reference to the Mass or the Liturgy the post modern confusion of those of us born during the Vietnam war is splayed out upon the operating table like spaghetti and meatballs on a dirty kitchen floor.

“I am one and Plural”

But just when you think that you have found the next Pound, poor Walt Whitman enters the picture. As with the line above a common person touch that survived Ms Daly’s Ivy league education to reveal a sense of the masses that most postmodern poets do not possess.  When Ms Daly says in her interview with CPMP that she comes from a blue collar city in the Midwest (Decatur, Illinois) the essentialness of that fact comes through here even though she now writes in Los Angeles.

“the abbot was female, friendly, a find”

Catherine Daly’s DaDaDa is a book of great depth that demands much to the reader.  The book is divided into the following sections; Reading Fundamentals, Heresy, and Legendary. In these sections Ms Daly brings together collage, history, religion, poetry and a truly Generation X sense of irony that makes DaDaDa a book to be read and to be examined.

But it might help when reading it to have a copy of the lives of the saints along side to get some of the references that are opaque but rich. The mystical/Catholic images are very well formed and the use of Desert Father/Mother and Medieval imagery are really masterful. the sometimes use of popular culture references can sometimes seemed forced but then we go right back into the river of the work and we are carried along at high speeds.

This books ends fast and leaves us wondering why it this all over?

“the door is a door is closed” in this line from the last stanza of the last poem in this book we are abruptly broken from our reading and left like a groom at the altar wondering who we will sleep with tonight?

For more about Catherine's work and locations to buy her book, check out www.catherinedaly.info