The Door Open to the Fire (Cleveland State University Poetry Series: LV) (Csu Poetry Series Vol. Lv) (Csu Poetry Series Vol. Lv)
Chatty and free-flowing, Vollmers best poems are generous celebrations of Pittsburgh and her ethnic family; the winner of Wisconsins Brittingham Prize for her first book, Level Green (1991), Vollmer teaches college writing and incorporates her experiences in a number of overly loose poems, in which she quotes her students, who also complain about her poetic models, including James Wright, the subject of a long homage for his portraits of hobos. Given to political rants, she recalls teaching in a barbaric high school during the Reagan years, when she had eaten Reagan/like a dot/of blotter acid, whatever that means. Vollmer frankly details her sexual history as well, remembering a long-ago abortion (Passing the Clinic in a Small Town) and then, in What She Didnt Tell Him, recalling the joyful relief afterward. A walker in the city, the poet sees the poor and the workers, but shes also capable of more subtle observation: We Built This City inventories its multitudes; Night Walks recommends a nocturnal journey (with mythic echoes) as an antidote to insomnia; and her one fully realized poem, The Approach, matches its claustrophobic couplets to her experience stuck in a traffic jam underground, with the promise of light ahead. With the tribal/ethnic force of Forche or Broumas, Vollmer sings herself and her city.  --Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.