Loss

Poetry. ".I was born a year after Wieners' first collection was published, THE HOTEL WENTLEY POEMS, and can't vouch for the accuracy of that book's depiction of 1950's bohemian life. Access may not be the right word anyhow to describe what it takes to read this poet. Dramatic to a fault, Wieners' work stages a gaudy spectacle of life: stages, and thus maintains at a distance. Identify? The poet as actor seduces and evades identification all at once. Seduces, by arousing sympathy, awe, desire. Evades, by remaining mysteriuos, out of reach, a trick of anxious language"-from LOSS.