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– Jackie Ankerson, in ForeWord Magazine, 1999/01/01

Award winner and author of Lessons in Space (1997), Cathleen Calbert’s newest anthology reveals a spectrum of emotions; from depressing poems of loss and longing in the writing of "My Dead Boyfriend" and "Bad Judgment" to "Lunatic Snow," which is contemplative and leaves one with a smile. Calbert takes everyday real experiences and combines them with a surrealistic tone to create a very deep, thought-provoking experience for the reader.

Appreciation can be found for the way Calbert’s eco-feminism views are brought to light in her work. In the poem "My Summer as a Bride" she questions how many thousands of worms died as she pulls on silken gloves and acknowledges as she became aware of the pearls on her dress the countless oyster beds that have been plundered. She also gives reference to the women who created the dress and the fairy tale-like beauty that it possessed. In the poem "Dark Water" she describes the sensuality of being in the water, near dusk with her new husband. Her description of the color changing on her skin as they move in and out of the water, the color of the trees and the weightlessness she describes are done with depth, creativity, and leaves one feeling as enchanted as she did that night.

This collection of Calbert’s poetry would be a wonderful addition for high school classrooms as well as for the avid poetry connoisseur.

– Reviewer, in Publishers Weekly, 1999/01/25

The mordant, deadpan attitude of Calbert’s second collection finds its appropriate subject matter in the figures that populate her poems: vampire cats and bloodsucking babies, death-warmed-over boyfriends, black-clad academics on the beach. In a dream world full of the living dead, Calbert’s voice is the insistent, up-and-at-‘em whip. These poems have an ironic mission to locate the spiritual and spirited; they blow on the ashes with provocative language and the imperative’s urgency. The poet declares with confidence in "The Last Angel Poem": "They are everywhere we want them to be: / on the stems of our apples, at the garden door, / in clogged chimneys, basement crawl spaces, our boyfriends’ dirty blue jeans. / Tell the worried theologians they are / not done for." The speaker of "A Lady with a Pomeranian" sardonically finds "Meaning!" and "More Meaning!" in suggestive, but ultimately banal and arbitrary events like having a bird fly in her window and finding a Queen of Hearts card in the street. Now and again Calbert cheapens her hard frankness with pop-song optimism—like at the conclusion of "Trinity" when the speaker falsely resolves her deep loneliness with "and the crickets count out a beat to our lives, / and I kiss my dog, who sleeps at my feet." But ultimately, Calbert presides authoritatively over her own work, and her judgment is refreshingly sound.

– Vicki Lambert, in Poet Lore, 1999/01/06

Bad Judgment. Who wouldn’t be drawn in by such a title and then persuaded to delve into the opening called "When Nights Were Full of Sex and Churches"? Who wouldn’t be glad to come upon its playful language

everyone I’ve ever slept with
even once, even just barely, swept free into the light
of a cloudless moon, waving, hi, hi. They are drunk, pale,
silly upside down, their shoes dancing above their heads.
These many men are smiling, looking down, seeing me.
I can hear the happy clatter of their dangling genitals

that slides, as in many of these poems, into bewildered questioning and poignant loss?

Cathleen Calbert draws her reader in with apparently simple lines like "People notice less than you think" in "My Dead Boyfriends" and then trails from that public visible blank place deep into a private invisible world bared and pointed out for notice. She writes of alienation and disappointment without whining or wallowing or resting in the negative. Instead she questions and explores. The first lines of "When Forever Began" both set a scene and question it:

He’s leaning into me whispering, darling
I love you madly, and I’m thinking, why mad?

In line 20 of this 24-line poem she makes explicit her book’s theme, "I have never understood the language of love."

Calbert is searching here for meaning and connection. Aren’t we all? But to this common quest she brings an uncommon colloquial elegance, using nothing more than the everyday words we know and feel. No reference books are needed to follow what she’s saying. Hers is a woman’s voice, mature and sure even, or especially, in its doubts. She spells out sex without a single wrong loud note of swagger. Her occasional appropriate four-letter words are spoken simply in the uncensored honesty of an adult mind, neither showing off nor holding back, telling only those details that matter. In "Floating," for example, she uses explicit, raw sexual metaphor to describe gender-linked suicide or survival:

After years of going down,
we know how to swallow
anything, even bodies
of water, the stones in our pockets
denying the truth that women
float more easily than men do.

Flip through this book and find each poem looks different, and yet Calbert’s distinctive voice is clearly heard in all of them.

The beauty of this collection is not just its straightforward expression of enormously understandable desires and losses, but in its refusal to become monotonous or heavy. The title poem should be enough to make whole hosts of women weep in recognition. Down two and a half pages full of commas, a few question marks, one exclamation point, to the only period, the poem is skillfully interlocked with repeated words, linked images; enough to call up floods of tears but doesn’t, isn’t really meant to. "Bad Judgment" is not an indictment of others or of fate, not a victim’s assessment. The last stanza of "A Lady with a Pomeranian" says this outright:

and I am left alone with this life
that somewhere along the line
with my own God-given free will—
let’s deny destiny—I must have chosen.

These poems are alive with a peculiar sort of wishing, a current of unpitying, forlorn hope.

Of course, not every one is unflawed. The weakest of them, though still strong, are the openly political like "Self" about the gendered aspects of our selves. Here Calbert wastes two stanzas of an otherwise effectively phrased poem in the predictable recitation:

as it was for the women who stoked
forties’ factories before going home
to slow suicides in the fifties,
who were free to please in the sixties,
not ask anything of seventies’ men
and in the eighties, able to be them.

Such lapses into stale description are few, though, and far from dreadful.

Bad Judgment is polished and well ordered in its progression from dark to light. It opens in the first person calling after ghosts of lost lovers and closes with "there’s still love, pleasure, good wine, wet sand, mixed feeling, / and
the cold solace of knowing I’m on the right side of history."

– Stephanie Zacharek, in The New York Times Book Review, 1999/09/05

If all of Cathleen Calbert’s poems were about the "otherness" of being a single woman making her way in the world—as the first few poems in this collection are—they’d become tiresome pretty quickly. But the collection builds beautifully, subtly changing shape, and the final poem is about something different but related: the otherness of being part of a couple and realizing that, despite the security of being together, as a pair and as individuals you’re still likely to run into plenty of people who don’t understand you. Calbert’s poems are wrought from straightforward, serviceable language with the occasional welcome curlicue, and most have an easy narrative drive. Many of them are about tentatively yearning for love but hoping not to have to admit it; others are about finding it and realizing how fragile and valuable it is. In that final poem, "Vampires at the Beach," a couple who don’t much care for the sun are invited to Newport by some friends. They’re awkward and pale sitting on the beach, but after they retreat to their room, the woman feels more and more reassured of their private normality, outlining the day-to-day pleasures they share with each other and their beloved dog: "We eat fresh basil, arugula, sun-dried tomatoes, and live in a pleasant, rented dinginess /—sunken sofa, broken crockery—along with our furry baby." Friends with "real" children respond, "He’s a dog! A dog! we’ve given birth to nothing." But Calbert knows better than to buy into such pronouncement: her talent lies in the way she rails against them.

– Victoria Clausi, in Ploughshares, 1999/01/10

Calbert’s second book, Bad Judgment, is a searching, sometimes seething look at the traditions of love and marriage, revealing a strong voice adept in the use of irony. These poems frequently open onto a world poised between the surreal and the real, between loss and fulfillment, where the dominant voice vacillates between wanting the "dream / of wedding veils, floating higher, turning blue / in a world made of colors and marital sex? And disdaining them. "In my night sky, I have only men, harmonizing: / There was a serpent who loved to sing, there was, / there was, hiss hiss. Thus, he forsook his serpenting / because he was in love, he was." Another poem, which was included in The Best American Poetry 1995, discovers a woman’s love for things reversed "until she was loved by trees and appliances, from toasters / to natural obstacles, until her ceiling shook loose to send kisses" and "until everything living and unliving wonderfully collided."

Calbert seduces readers with satiric collisions from the start, even within the table of contents: "The Nights Were Full of Sex and Churches," "The Woman Who Loved Things," "My Dead Boyfriend," "Dream Babies," "The Vampire Baby," "Dead Debutante," "Lunatic Snow," and "The Last Angel Poem."

With an elegance reminiscent of Whitman, these poems celebrate the singer as vigorously as they do the song. The result: lyrics that are witty, cynical, sharp-edged, stunning. Although some critics might take exception to Calbert’s extensive use of catalogue, they’d have to concede that she is very good at the technique—so good, in fact, the reader is more likely to see herself reflected in the poem than she is to feel manipulated by the poet.

Mimicking the disassociation that loss can cause, "After the Tragedy" begins: "We put away the dishes. / Someone changed the sheets. / Windows were opened, then painted blue, and painted shut. / We wrote lists and threw the lists away." After a transition that forces the mourners to claim, "We watched ourselves weep in the mirror to see how ugly we could be," the speaker turns inward—to a wilder, darker, reflective list: "We slipped a sliver of faith into the lining of a checked apron. / We slipped a sliver of faith into the veins at our wrist, wondering if it would work its way to our heart. / We sang ‘Sweet Bird of Youth’ and ‘Sweet Mystery.’"

In "Beyond the Power of Positive Thinking," Calbert’s well-tuned device of repetition is combined with sardonic little slaps at positivism gone bad. "I’ve stopped holding on to negative energy / and no longer need academic poverty. / I am radiant and free, calm and serene. // It’s okay to have a green Mercedes. / I can accept a green Mercedes. / A green Mercedes is okay with me."

Part of the pleasure of reading Calbert’s poetry is watching her play: with language, with sound, with tradition, with the reader. Bad Judgment? Hardly. This is a wise book: sexy, witty, irreverent, and filled with moments of brilliance, carefully crafted by a poet who loves "the sweet suck of consenting molecules" so much she can’t help revealing the comic absurdity and beauty of the resulting collisions. Bad Judgment delivers poems that are, in Richard Howard’s words, "so cool, so speculative, so disabused, so warm."

– Liz Rosenberg, in The Boston Sunday Globe, 1999/12/09

Cathleen Calbert, in her tour-de-force second book of poems, Bad Judgment, takes on the role of fool: donning masks and costumes, spinning out lines of rapid-fire witticisms. Her narrator is mercurial, moving in an instant from cackling laughter to sobs. In "Vampires at the Beach," narrator and husband "huddle in our clothes, black, long-sleeved . . . our skin white as leprosy, our fine profiles / turned from the sun." In "Dead Debutante," "Blood sprayed down my yellow gown, / which happens to look great on me / although it’s pinned in the back / and the nail polish has me lacquered in."

A brittle, fragile, "lacquered in" persona dominates many of the book’s poems. Calbert’s use of language—her almost compulsive punning and cataloging—can be facile rather than felicitous. But then, she is a poet deliciously out on a limb, creating a self not always likable: edgy, self-pitying, fast-talking, and secretly contemptuous, studiously observing both the world and herself down to the finest point. At her best, she is brilliant, acrobatic, swooping above, around, and below. The book’s opening poem, "When Nights Were Full of Sex and Churches," is a tribute to painter Marc Chagall and more:

These many men are smiling, looking down, seeing me.
I can hear the happy clatter of their dangling genitals.
But why can’t I see a cow with pretty eyes, a gold chicken
in a peasant sky? Why can’t I be that red-haired woman
sleeping in Chagall’s heavenly tree? Then I could dream
of wedding veils, floating higher, turning blue
in a world made of colors and marital sex, happiness,
breasts painted into big circles, childlike hands at ease.

Here, straight off, one finds many of the book’s pervasive themes and obsessions: longing, loneliness, sex, art, beauty, absurdity. The remarkable title poem catalogs the dizzying ways we blind ourselves to terror:

I bet the child will be all right where he is,
it doesn’t get dark until late,
I’ll take the red-eye,
have the cheese steak,
you keep track of the receipts,
we’ll only meet for coffee,
I’ll weigh less in a couple of weeks,
I’ll take the job,
I’ll marry him.
I’ll see my mother in the spring,
no hurry. . . .

Calbert’s strength is in her merciless, inescapable voice—reminiscent in some ways of Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton—and the furious, focused ways she uses the first person to tell stories. It’s hard to excerpt her longer works without injustice to their impact and velocity. But here is the first stanza of my favorite in the book,

"When Forever Began":

He’s leaning into me, whispering, darling,
I love you madly, and I’m thinking, why mad?
Wanting to be loved sanely for a change,
wishing I could stop writing fragments to friends
in a strange, rhythmic scrawl: I’m crazy about him.
We’re made for each other. Can you get me out of here?
I’m righting the glasses he’s romantically knocked aside,
then blindly crossing the dark bar, fumbling my way
into the women’s room, where I find "Fran & Joey
4-ever 3/18 1:00 a.m." Is this when forever began?
Wiping my hands, I turn around to see "Paul and Amy
6 months and more." Then what? I ask.

There are poignant poems about the death of a best friend; the longing for normalcy and resistance to normalcy; the melancholy loveliness of a newlywed poem, written in calm, slow couplets:

When we leave this water,
I let you wrap my body
In the better towel and watch
as you bend down to loosen
a thistle from my pale pink foot,
my hand resting on your head,
which has also turned dark
gold in the early evening.
Then, in our rented room,
you begin again, my body
darkening into gold
as I feel myself slipping
into this new element.
We are still newly married.

It takes a deep mind to see the state of early matrimony as a "new element," and compare that element to the fluidity of water, the malleability of gold. And it’s a brave mind willing to show herself both wise and foolish in one book. In Bad Judgment, Cathleen Calbert dazzles, wounds, and delights.