For me, this is the finest of Rachel Hadas' generally excellent poetry collections. It is moving because Hadas explores one of the most potent landscapes available to poetry, the landscape of loss. She is a knowing Virgil, leading us through the hell of loneliness and loss and the briefly glimpsed heaven of consolatory rememberance. I found the sustained gravitas of the finest poems here not at all oppressive but ultimately uplifting, as the best art born of grief uplifts.

I went to Columbia, with the most prominent 'great books' curriculum still in existence. 25 years later, I'm finding myself re-reading and discussing many of the titles. The Penn Greek Drama series is a handsome library of new translations that give fresh takes on the classics. It's useful to have Euripides on the shelf when you return home from the recent bravura performance by Fiona Shaw as Medea--it settled an argument too on how it 'originally' ended.

A friend of mine suggested I read this collection because she knows I prefer metrical verse. Unfortunately, although many of the poems in this selection are formal, they aren't all that good. The metrical poems are proficient though not deft (one wishes for the music of a Donald Justice or cleverness of an Anthony Hecht), but the poems rarely involve you; the poems seem too much like diary work, which is great for the writer but not so great for others. I am not a poetry critic, but I can say this book isn't what I thought it was going to be. I figured a selected poems would be the best poems by the poet. After reading it, I am not up to reading her life's work to see if they were, in fact, the best.

I found this to be a wonderful book of poetry, particularly those poems written most recently. Hadas excells at writing about the everyday, for she turns the everyday into an occasion for seeing and feeling more keenly. And I love the music and wit of her couplets. This is a book to read aloud, to teach, and to enjoy.

Personnaly, I find the poetry in this book to be very powerful, if not as technically appealing as some of the other contemporary poets of the day. Her meter is slightly over done, but the rhythm that is established, powers the poem along to its conclusion. Her imagery and use of such literary tricks as consonance and assonance never fails to intrigue and delight me. It is a successful, though not triumphant work which deserves reading, and becomes more compelling once it is dissected for its technical style.

I bought this book for the reputation of the poet and when I finished reading the volume I realized the poems left an unidentifiable taste in my mouth. Not much salt or meat in the stanzas. Quite an insipid read!

Rachel Hadas's "Indelible" takes ordinary events in everyday life and transforms them in writing to the meaningful, treasured memories we carry around in our minds and hearts. At first glance, her poems may seem mundane, however, further probing reveals the intense emotions portrayed by way of her words. In "Fathers and Daughters, Mothers and Sons," she writes, "...And I: what father now was mine?/a voice demanded histrionically/inside my head. What likeness could I claim?" The earnestness of her voice is evident; the reader can practically hear her distress as she copes with the loss of her father. Death is a main character throughout the book, as she challenges the many aspects of coping with this permanent loss. In "The Letter," a woman relives the pain she felt for the friend she lost, nine years ago; "The Glass of Milk" speaks of the unpredictability of death and how suddenly it appears; "Mourning's Dichotomy" tells of the difficulty in determining the best way to mourn a death, as "Speech is pain and silence is defeat." Even poems that speak not of death have a relation to it, for example, in "The End of Summer," she asks repeatedly, "Where is the boy I put to bed?" referring to her son, who has become a teenager-in a sense, the son she put to bed is now dead, in his place, an overgrown man, independent, yet still resembling the son she once knew. Although I have never been exposed to her earlier works, this book presents a wise, mature woman, one who has mulled over the meanings of life (or more appropriately, death). Hadas obviously writes for those interested in probing deeper into human experiences; those who solely enjoy light topics and do not wish to examine the nooks and crannies of our everyday experiences and losses would do well to stay away from this book. However, for anyone who enjoys pondering about and really getting to the core of their innermost feelings, this book is a wonderful companion with which to do just that.

The "reader from New York" who posted the previous review is hardly being fair. Hadas's formalism is anything but metronomic. And to dismiss the domestic scale of this book is to misunderstand its main virtues. This is a book that mulls over some of the truly big questions (grief, familial bonds, material inheritance) as they impinge on a single life, and the poems move with genuine grace. A poem like "Recycling" might seem to be little more than a record of Hadas's habits of domestic economy, but as she retains and re-uses the habits of her father or the literary tastes of her friend (whose files she inherits after his death), the poem begins to be about the way all of our trasured abstractions (friendship, family, literary tradition) become tangible relics. And it achieves this without seeming, to my ear, either moralizing or prosaic: when she ends by describing love as "recycled, feather-light, perennial," each of those words has picked up (from earlier in the poem) a powerful set of meanings.
If, as a reader, you're uninterested in the curious, inscrutable ties between family members (which change, of course, as the family grows older: "Where is the boy I put to bed?" she asks regarding her teenaged son) -- if you don't care, either, to get to the bottom of grief ("And that was the last time. / But in what sense the last?" she asks of another recently deceased friend) -- then these patient, intelligent, but modest poems may not be for you. They aren't full of violent experiment, attempts at sublime effect, or radical freedoms. However, there are many quietly moving moments in _Indelible_, and I find many of the poems still haunt me months after I first read the book.