Victims of the Latest Dance Craze (Dialogues on Dance #5)

A vibrant collection of poems. Victims of the Latest Dance Craze is the 1985 Lamont Poetry Selection, a distinguished award for an author's second book of poems. The book is well-made and handsomely illustrated with glyphlike graphics by Susan Micklem. Ommation Press, the publisher, has a history of dedicating itself to poetry concerned with dance and Eady's text is the fifth in the press's Dialogues on Dance Series. Ommation's longstanding focus on poetry and dance has earned it a solid reputation among poets concerned with this synthesis of creative forms and readers should be similarly informed about this publisher's particular excellence. Worthy alone of the price of the book is the poem 'Jazz Dancer." Its obsessive celebration of the jazzman's "war against/the obvious" results in a praiseful litany as the poet enunciates a lovely catalogue of theories about air, motion, kisses, "long glances from across a ballroom" and "certain kinds of thirst." The poem's leaping connections harmoniously join an odd geography of emotional and physical material into a most beautiful composition. Throughout this volume each reader will discover special favorites from among the 29 individual poems. Eady locates the dance in a marvelous array of possibilities: April, Johnny in his red shoes, umbrellas and the wooden pillars that hold up the roof, lip synchers, boom box totcrs, gravity, lipstick, crows on a windy roof, the allnight clerk who "behind the bullet-proof glass sways his hips." Throughout, the language is accessible and direct, clean in spirit and statement, delightfully innocent and honest. He doesn't pretend to know all the answers to the pop of fingers or the beat's bop, and in "The Poetic Interpretation of the Twist" admits with adept understatemerit " - . . I am still confused by the mini-skirt /As well as the deep meaning of vinyl.. .