Love’s Searching Music: A Review of MODERN POETRY by Diane Seuss
- elichvar
- Apr 11
- 5 min read
Updated: 3 hours ago
Diane Seuss
Modern Poetry
Graywolf Press / 2024 / 112 pp / $26.00
Reviewed by Melissa Shepherd / April 2025
In Modern Poetry, Diane Seuss declares her love for a genre she seems to redefine and remaster with each new collection. This one, her sixth and coming off the Pulitzer Prize-winning frank: sonnets, is no straightforward romance, nor could it ever be in the hands of one of the most inventive poets working today. Instead, it’s a twisty ride—through literary awakening and education, eclectic source material, doubt, and self-reflection—accompanied by a finely tuned score and some notable crushes (chief among them, John Keats).
Music is the love language of the book and an organizing principle. Nearly half of the forty-one poems have music in their titles; from fugues to folk, from classical to cowpunk, Seuss punctuates Modern Poetry with songs that show her range. A ballad series makes the strongest impression, acting as a kind of anchor for the book’s structure—an orchestration of musical and literary references across nine sections that seems especially composed after the free-flow approach of frank: sonnets. As the sonnet did in that book, the ballad here shows the poet’s ability to innovate traditional form. While Seuss upholds the ballad’s narrative roots and its close association with romance and tragedy, the music she makes of it is less woeful than strikingly vulnerable, the rhythms more oddly beautiful. The first, titled simply “Ballad,” as if to mark it as an origin story, is a prime example. It recounts the day her mother picked her up early from school after her father died, and describes the moment she heard the news this way:
My sister, angry-crying next to me.
Me, encountering a fragment of evil in myself.
Evilly wanting my mother to say it.
What? I asked, smiling. My lamb on full display at the fair.
He’s dead! my sister said. Hit me in the gut with her flute.
Her flute case. Her rental flute. He’s dead!
Love is coupled with blunt honesty like this in much of the book. Seuss is not afraid to lay out her limitations, but, ironically, that stance only underscores her gift for evocative and surprising language. This is most apparent when she writes of her long love affair with writing. “Ballad from the Soundhole of an Unstrung Guitar” lends a weirdly erotic mood to the “hellhole” of an attic where she says she did her best writing. She remembers the space as having no furniture or comforts but also “No ethics. No lock on the door. / No worries about vermin, rabies, fleas,” where she leaves behind a lover’s writing on “typewriter ribbon I stuck in a knothole.” “Ballad in Sestets,” an astonishingly clever piece of ars poetica (among several in the book), begins with her saying “I would like to have better ideas / than the ideas I have,” and that no matter the idea “I can’t leap / to it,” then proceeds to leap rapid-fire from idea to idea through metaphor. There are “towers of sheer red / rock” she can’t climb and soaring cathedrals where she can’t “corner and pocket the miniscule / priest” alongside small spaces where she feels “tucked inside / the incalculable” like a “sloughed-off sequin in a warehouse” or “a jar filled with pigs’ feet, / lost in the giant’s pantry.” The poem’s closing image captures a “honeymoon” phase in quintessentially Seussian fashion—specific and sharp—comparing it to “a newborn birthed / in an icy field, steam spiraling / from the gash / of its open mouth like it had just taken / a drag from its first cigarette.”
The interplay of what’s ugly and what’s beautiful is a hallmark of Modern Poetry. The last ballad, “Ballad that Ends with Bitch,” ties back to her father’s death and captures the price of her literary devotion in the extended metaphor of a scarred dog:
When I returned to my digs, the house was frozen stiff.
A fine skim of hoarfrost on the writing desk.
Why call it a writing desk?
It’s commerce-covered. Bills. Tat. That. This.
At age ten, I turned away from tenderness.
I remember the moment. A flipping of a switch.
My house is a cold mess except for that thing in the corner.
Poetry, that snarling, flaming bitch.
The music at page level—the assonance and consonance, the rhyme and varied pace—belies the shortcomings she finds in herself and in her writing. The language is too lush for the reader to ever really buy that Seuss has turned her back on tenderness. Instead, the reader marvels at her searching, unflinching brand of it. “Penetralium” paints her poetic mind as a place “fermented in swamp, dung, skunk,” but a “shit show / where the greenest / watercress grows.” She relegates her writing to a “cobbled / landscape” and “the edge of tradition” in the treatise-like “My Education” but shows respect for that position: “I have camped / at this outpost my whole life, as did my mother, / who slept on sugar sacks in the basement / or on the front porch . . . just to keep herself forsaken.” In the final poem of the book, “Romantic Poet,” Seuss distills her crush on Keats in a way similar to how Shakespeare (Keats’s own crush) sang of love’s imperfections in his famous sonnet “My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun.” For ten lines, Seuss lists the romantic poet’s unappealing traits, his lack of hygiene and short stature, as laid out by a friend of hers (and, pointedly, a scholar, which she never calls herself despite being a college professor for decades); then, in one last consequential line, she turns the poem on a dime: “But the nightingale, I said.”
That final poem lands like a mic drop, not just because it so crisply defines Keats’s influence, which has already permeated the book in other poems and more broadly in how Seuss embraces his pioneering idea of negative capability, of making room for doubt in poetry. “Romantic Poet” also hits hard because it comes after a whole book full of searching through experience, the good and the bad. Sometimes Seuss is in the throes of love, as during her passionate encounter with Keats’s “death mask” in the expansive “Romantic Poetry,” and sometimes she is distant enough to reflect on it, as in the rhetorical “Love Letter.”
In “Love Letter,” she likens what love once meant for her to having lace: “Procuring lace / and arranging it / on my body in a certain way. / Isn’t that funny and/or strange?” and later she finds a description that feels more fitting for this time and place. “I read of a feral dog who could only be captured / by putting the soiled blankets of her puppies / in a live trap,” she says. “This is my metaphor for a love letter.” Diane Seuss never minces words to make love sweet, not here or anywhere in Modern Poetry. Instead, she sits in the muck of life and sees its offbeat beauty, a kind of romance not hinging on answers but on the music questions make.
Melissa Shepherd is an MFA candidate in poetry at the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University. She lives and writes in the big little city of Hoboken, New Jersey, where she also advocates for the performing arts and paints large-scale acrylics. She is a diehard fan of her husband, her two teenagers, David Bowie, cold-brew coffee, and NPR.