Bardo
Suzanne Paola fuses the Tibetan bardo journey with Western epic tradition in ways that are both comic and harrowing. Bardo is the intermediate state after death when the soul wanders through the heavens and the hells while trying to avoid rebirth into samsara—the realm of the material—and to instead reach nirvana. Paola presents a series of this life's bardo experiences: drug use, the refused birth of infertility, the social implications of the female body, even a trip to the fantastic "afterworld" of pop culture. Bardo 's journey travels to a place where "to be human is to be part god, / part sickness, / always wondering which is which."
Awards
- 1998 Best Book of the Year, by the Bookman News/A List Review Group
- 1998 Brittingham Prize for a poetry manuscript, Judged by Donald Hall
Reviews
Sometimes attentive to myth and mysticism, more often chillingly psychological, Paola investigates--with tones and devices that recall Louise Gluck's masterworks from the '80s and '90s--childbirth and motherhood, spare American landscapes and garden flowes, reincarnation, love, self-hate and fear.
—Publisher's Weekly
This is a tough book but a fine collection that shows how Paola has gone beyond the poetic moment to achieve a breathless calling and a higher art.
—Bloomsbury Review
Winner of the 1998 Brittingham Prize in Poetry, Bardo is a work of remarkable lyric intelligence and visionary power.
—Dan Tobin, Boston Review
"Suzanne Paola's poetry, as represented in Bardo, is to my mind truly remarkable, even heroic. Again and again, she takes on subjects and experiences many writers would find unmanageable. She not only treats these difficult matters successfully; she transforms them, triumphantly, into music, into the most exacting examples of her craft, into a dance of language and emotion whose authority we can not only acknowledge but rejoice in."
—David Young
"Bardo is a terrific collection of poems. After the deluge of prose books pairing Tao and physics, Zen and VW maintenance, it's a special pleasure to have it all done now with a poet's bounty and accuracy: Suzanne Paola, freestyling snappily down the line between scholarship and sass, combines Tibetan Buddhism with the drugged-out rocked-up boomer American landscape, and brings the full bravura energy of her vision (part classical Rome, part glitzy Caesar's Palace) to bear upon all of our invaluable, fractured lives."
—Albert Goldbarth
"In Bardo, a god-haunted poet scrabbles for the sublime in the debris of language, the rubbish of visions. Instructed by Tibetan Buddhism, by Homer, and by the Book of Revelations, Suzanne Paola's poems glimmer with verbal inventiveness but accept the discipline of clear sight and human boundaries. A flamboyant and searching book."
—Rosanna Warren