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Glare
A. R. Ammons
W. W. Norton, $25

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In contrast to his previous book-length poem Garbage (1993), "the central // image of this poem is that it has no / mound gathering stuff up but strews // itself across a random plain randomly." The lack of a sustaining centrality through 300 pages of couplets is at times unsatisfying, and Ammons knows it: "I just feel so / broken down." But at 71, Ammons is more playful than ever-like "breezes in the treezes"-and the deep play in Glare breaks through the "crises of fear" into some of his most astonishing and self-knowing lyric: "you // have to be careful of transcendentalists: on / one side of their goofiness is carnal misery // and on the other the prettiest high slides / glee ever broke out of." As his knowing becomes the doing, Ammons extends the reach of his lyrical gift, and his expression of hope becomes the enactment of its own fulfillment: "I could spell out / my dream along a good line some beauty // might take a turn to, and then we / would be toe to toe on the floor, // the music swaying us and educating / our wishes and edging us toward the // closure that is our temporary but / essential solution."

--Mark Dow

Elemenopy
Michael Coffey
Sun & Moon Press, $10.95 (paper)

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Ordered in progressively intrepid sections, ("Loving," "Lichen," "Otherwards," and "Javajazyk"), the poems in Elemenopy adopt four distinct stances from which to examine "(the poet's) and the poems' relationship to language." To some, this may sound self-serious and heavy, but Coffey's exuberance and wit make light of the endeavor: what might have been leaden is instead (mostly) gold. While the poems in "Loving" most closely resemble conventional lyrics, they also provide us with the clearest sense of Coffey's own voice, its self-ironizing aplomb: "I'm committed, thanks, / to six-line stanzas, / the // last line one word. / A frame of a sort, / the beat of a minute. / I'm committed, thanks, / to sex with stanzas, / love, // and you're in it." The hard-edged, wryly crafted prose pieces in "Lichen" owe as much to Denis Johnson as to Hemingway and Stein, and in the first of the two "Suites" that make up "Otherwards," Coffey pays tribute to Stein exquisitely: "They had likeness to loving. They had a likeness to loving because they did not measure." The last section of Elemenopy, "Javajazyk," deploys an invented language to tell what purports to be a "linguistic romance ending in prayer." It will delight or madden, according to the reader's mood-if approached on the heels of the rest of the book, as it should be, it will delight.

--Timothy Donnelly

The Poem's Heartbeat: A Manual of Prosody
Alfred Corn
Story Line Press, $10 (paper)

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This book shatters stereotypes equating the study of prosody with poetry boot camp and instead introduces the fine art of versification. In clear bell tones that are this master poet's rhythmic signature, nuances of rhyme, rhythm, and meter are conveyed in precise, tactile language sensitive to history and etymology. Usually dry definitions are transformed into subtle image schemes that work as superior mnemonic devices. We learn, for example, that "line" comes from the Latin linea, which is derived from the word for a thread of linen. Corn compares the composition of lines to weaving a thread slowly from left to right. In the hands of the skilled poet, a line's repeated "quick left reversal" at the text's margin can hypnotize, or summon the unconscious part of the mind. Metrical variations, usually muddled through by most texts, here receive their own lucid chapter that thoroughly prepares the poet for progressively more complex sections. By the book's end, Corn, magi-teacher and impeccable guide, has taught the novice to become artist and magician, wielding stress and syllable to spark "intuitive and technical lightning-flashes" and a "depth charge of insight" that leave the dreary formal footsteps of tradition far behind.

--Kymberly Taylor

The Woman Who Died in her Sleep
Linda Gregerson
Houghton Mifflin, $13 (paper)

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Acts of violence and other disturbances of the body's wholeness-and the self's-are key here. "Amazing what the flesh can make of all this in- / terruption," exclaims the title poem. But more amazing than the body's vulnerability to harm-to "harrows and scythes" -is its capacity for grace. The flesh, prone to self-destruction, "targeted for harm by the system designed to keep it safe," is also capable of transubstantiation: "who swallows the amnion now / will swallow milk / by winter." If "interruption" underlies both malignant and beneficial changes in the body, it also transforms consciousness. In spare, almost reportorial language, Gregerson pursues a train of thought (or narrative) determinedly across thought-rupturing line breaks. Then, half-casually, she unspools a line of pure music, an image which, altering the current as it does, somehow fuses the poem's earthly and metaphysical concerns: "cells dividing have / no mind / for us, but look // what a ravishing mind / they make / and what a heart we've nursed // in its shade, who love / that most / which leaves us most behind." These are skillful, intelligent, and thoughtful poems, at once wounding and redemptive.

--Miranda Field

Incorrect Distances
Tracy Philpot
University of Georgia Press, $15.95 (paper)

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Philpot's astonishing debut takes its name from a Lacanian reference to incest: "an incorrect distance from loved ones." A domestic violence counsellor in Seldovia, Alaska, Philpot is well-acquainted with narratives of pathological relationships-incestuous, violent, emotionally abusive. "She's named her bruises / Jellyfish and Rorschach," she writes in "How the Crazy Love." In "Wildlife," the speaker tells a lover, "I want to be the best scar on your body." Philpot expresses, as in "The Holiday of Escape," what it means to be irrevocably hardened by betrayal: "Even if I've loved you this way once / it will never happen again." In "A Victim in a Beautiful House," the horrors of an existence rampant with abuse and upheaval are catalogued matter-of-factly: "a personal life written on shift notes / a roof that prevents beauty / a secluded voice of dystonic verbs / -and now they say even the scraps of dreams / will kill you in your sleep." Here, as in so many of her poems, Philpot arrives at a heartbreaking discovery, noting that "paradise is porous, / intoxicating, and has very few / whole people in it." Her eloquent reportage reminds us that in a world in which every day "[s]omeone's life is a meteor let go," innocence is no longer possible.

--Carmela Ciuraru

The Diary of James Schuyler
Edited by Nathan Kernan
Black Sparrow Press, $27.50, $15 (paper)

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Schuyler's poetry digs to the core of daily living in order to transcend it so convincingly. Daily living's a daily chore, and this poet imagined and titled his poems accordingly: "May 24th or So," "A Few Days," "Vermont Diary," "8/12/70," and so on. What to expect, then, from the diary of a poet whose approach was so diaristic to start with? Raw material galore-biography, memory, backstory. (Schuyler was formerly an art critic and at one-time a secretary to W. H. Auden.) But that's just the beginning; this fine book not only augments Schuyler's sizable poetic output but enriches it as well. There's a candor or lucidity to these journal entries that stands apart from (and next to) his point-blank lyrics and chapbook-length narrative poems. We know the routine already, but this time we're standing backstage. Lucky for us. Here, we see the writing is vivid and clean as ever, as after a day's events in March: "On this brilliant, cool, delicious day the city seems the work of a child who owns a pencil, a ruler, and a paint set." And editor Kernan knows his subject utterly, usefully well. A footnote defining an artist known for his ceiling frescoes reads: "Giambattista Tiepolo (1696-1770), Venetian painter; like Schuyler, a poet of skies."

--Scott Pitcock