Poetry Microreviews

Neither World
Ralph Angel
Miami University Press, $9.95 (paper)

Reviewers today are too quick to hail meandering, loosely organized poetry with the claim that its rhythms and movements recall those of jazz. Tried conventions of one art do not necessarily spell success when applied to another, no matter how knowingly, and no matter how warmly we welcome the idea. (Past adoptions of a jazz sensibility have brought us such brilliance as William Matthew's "Mood Indigo.") In many of the poems found in Neither World, the speaker's eye lights on no one object long enough to trust, words slink down the page with the feeling of subterfuge, thought gets scattershot: "Admit it. We've let each other down. And then,/ congratulations. We knew exactly what would happen./The canvas shoes and warm Cokes./Those great, dull buildings . . . ." These leaps and vacillations might tickle early on, but randomness eventually numbs. We long for a purpose, a noteworthy principle other than riff.
--Timothy Donnelly

The Spirit Level
David Barber
TriQuarterly Books, $12.95 (paper)

The poems in David Barber's first collection arise from a rift between contemporary sensibility and a stiff, slightly archaic diction. This apparent dissonance works effectively in poems such as "Memo to the Hereafter," where the poet keeps his lens fixed to the rust he wants in eternity as a "memento mori in reverse." But in other poems the expression can become overly self-conscious and distract the reader from the poem's metaphorical content, as in "Ladies of the Necropolis" which begins: "Ferret of the imperial library, laureate of prurience,/Suetonius survives in codexes of scuttlebutt." Winner of the Terrence des Pres prize, The Spirit Level does showcase unquestionable talent and craft. Poems like "Prospectus" -- in which Barber unveils a "field guide to wind," then an "inventory of unrest," and concludes "filling whole pages with gasps and sighs" -- offer a glimpse of this poet's promise.
-- Paul Lentz

So It Goes
Eamon Grennan
Graywolf Press, $14 (paper)

"Outing," like many poems in this third collection, details excursions that are also leave-takings, elegies in glimpses. Grieving the deaths of his parents, the speaker turns to a compendium of observed phenomena (from ocean panoramas to a scrutinized pinch of salt) and preserves them in poems, his pliable syntax yoking image to reflection. Grennan often chooses a self-admonishing "you" as his mode of address, and this sometimes troubles the volume with its accusatory vim; the reader is gripped by the shoulders and forced to stare. But the poems reward (despite some explanatory overwritings) with their distilled visions of reconciliation between the living and the dead, a "blind contract between honeydew and carrion." The creatural world occasions the use of this technique beautifully: Eyeing a trapped bat's strategy for escape, the speaker adapts to loss with a lithe tenacity, learning to "steer/by glancing touches, aftershocks, and the fleeting grace/of dark advances . . . ."
-- Barbara Fischer

Corvus
Anselm Hollo
Coffee House Press $11.95 (paper)

Here is a poet capable of teaching the curious how to read what some would still call avant-garde poetry. These poems are snips and snaps of contemporary life run together with a taut gathering stitch and played off against particular moments and figures in the history of ideas, literature, and politics. This dexterous and often humorous interplay creates moments of surprise, as in "Why There Is A Cat Curfew In Our House." The poem, an energetic narrative about a family of raccoons coming in through the cat door late at night, ends with a wry nod to the desire for more: "& if I were a Victorian poet there'd be a moral/but late in my century all I can say/is that she did of course remind me of my mother." Notes at the back help unlock the references for those who are not content to just go along for the ride.
-- Mary Jo Bang

An Early Afterlife
>Linda Pastan
W. W. Norton & Co., $10 (paper)

In her ninth book of poems (now available in paperback) Pastan has crafted a well-ordered whole, not a collection of disparate parts. Individual poems are bound to one another in a deft unraveling of imagery and subject. Where a father's silent punishment leaves the speaker coming apart "like a parcel" in one poem, the next describes "bagfuls of groceries" as the focus of a father's untrained oil paintings. She views a world from beginning to end; from the multi-faceted glass in which time melds from an Eden of lumberjacks felling "a carnage of chestnut, cedar, alder" to the 23 windows of an agoraphobic's home: "framed landscapes, containing each nuance of weather and light." Throughout, Pastan addresses both the humanity that links us and its ultimate conclusion, writing in a clean and comfortable language and imagery which belie the complexity of thought she evokes.
-- Paul Lentz

Dark Fields of the Republic
Adrienne Rich
W. W. Norton, $25 (cloth, includes audio cassette recording), $10 (paper )

The poet continues her argument with America, pitting her poetic exactitude and moral sensibility against the calculated neglect of our age. In her last book, An Atlas of the Difficult World, Rich grappled with her poetic ancestor Walt Whitman, reconfiguring his rhetorical structure to contend with a century remarkable for its cruelty. This, her fifteenth volume of poems, displays both a tender lyricism embodied in poems of a woman's love for other women, and a sharp argumentation that asks, "What Kind of Times are These?" Multiple voices are present -- Osip Mandelstam, Rosa Luxemburg, Bertolt Brecht, Hannah Arendt, W.H. Auden, Ethel Rosenberg -- in large, moving poems which chronicle and challenge the historical present while tempering it with loving dialogues between friends, and the hopeful act of putting pen to paper.
-- Mark Wunderlich

Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern & Postmodern Poetry.
Volume One: From Fin-de-Siècle to Negritude
Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, Eds.
University of California Press, $60 (cloth), $24.95 (paper)

Surely as a book is a finite thing, any anthology might be found lacking, but this bright new treasury dodges the complaint by admitting incompleteness. The editors "present it with the clear understanding that what has been omitted may, in other contexts, have as much value and interest as what has been included." So much said, this gathering is perfect as any can be, and deserves the attention it's getting. Beginning with "Forerunners" (Blake, Dickinson, Hopkins, et al.) and ending with "A Book of Origins" (works drawn "from the old worlds, brought newly into the present and viewed there as if for the first time"), the collection offers generous portions of futurism, expressionism, dada, surrealism, objectivism, and Negritude (a Black Francophone movement rooted in Caribbean and African soil, tinged with surrealism). Sticks-in-the-mud might fault the editors for their somewhat splashy prose style, but a less self-conscious approach to introduction and commentary would, in this case, have defeated the point.
--Timothy Donnelly

Directions to My House
Robyn Selman

University of Pittsburgh Press, $10.95

In an intimate voice, Selman's first book generously reveals a life -- touching, being held, the all-too-real probabilities of breakage, simple minutiae. Mixing conventional forms with unconventional rhyme schemes (sonnets appear most often), she writes at a runaway tempo that leaves the reader out of breath, anticipating. Selman frames the smart spiraled narratives of her journey to the house of the speaker in gentle lyrics. From "For the Field": "Come across the field. I wish you would now./With our dutiful mothers, come across, with the gold stolen from their cousins' teeth./I wouldn't ask if I weren't ready." And the reader, thus invited, travels with map in hand through the ordinary-and-not stories of daughter, wayfarer, lesbian, friend. The narratives are quirky and juicy with detail, formally playful, a wholly satisfying ride on Amtrak and Greyhound -- that slow, savoring kind -- through landscapes of memory, discovery, love.
-- Maureen Seaton

The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham
Helen Vendler
Harvard University Press, $14 (paper)

The Given and The Made: Strategies of Poetic Redefinition
Helen Vendler
Harvard University Press, $14 (paper)

In an era when theory has often distracted us from literature, Helen Vendler reminds us that poems, themselves, repay close attention. Her two most recent books insist on the importance of poetry's "material body." Both collections, which include essays on John Berryman, Rita Dove, Seamus Heaney, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Jorie Graham, contend that how a poem is written is at least as important as what it says. Vendler maintains that style is not only a matter of technique or expressive means, but has moral, political, and psychological implications which are missed if readers merely seek to decode a poem's "message."

The Breaking of Style examines meter, syntax, and line length, and demonstrates how these units of style generate verbal images reflecting the poet's inner life. Hopkins' use of sprung rhythm, for example, embodies "the psychic shock, both ecstatic and painful" of a poet preternaturally susceptible to the sensual and plagued by what he believed was sinful homoerotic longing. In Hopkins' "To What Serves Mortal Beauty," Vendler suggests that lines such as "Those lovely lads once, wet-fresh windfalls of war's storm . . ." render the dangerous "attractiveness of young men" in a barrage of alliterative and metrical stresses.

The Given and the Made, on the other hand, analyzes the "existential givens" which shape a poet's style. Jorie Graham's "trilingualism in American English, Italian and French," for instance, activates her poetry's restless "trying-on of several different linguistic expressions for the `same thing' -- as though language itself offered no perfect match for the material world." Thus Graham's poem, "I Was Taught Three," is emblematic of her predicament: "I was taught three/names for the tree facing my window . . . /Castagno . . . /Chassagne . . . /And then chestnut." Like the other poets Vendler discusses, Graham must cut her words from the cloth her individual necessity provides. --Malcolm Farley