Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced
Catherine Barnett
Alice James Books, $13.95 (paper)

The title of Catherine Barnett’s debut collection instantly reveals the stakes of its “tiny narrative for tying knots”: does a sphere sacrifice or realize its perfection when it is punctured? The poems themselves refuse to answer, “not wanting to be finished yet with death,” knowing that grief is “the sheen we bring to wood / when with repetitive gestures we polish the raw thing.” Barnett’s speaker pursues grief as relentlessly as it pierced her family when her sister’s daughters, aged six and eight, “disappeared into the ocean” on their flight back from a weekend with their father. The collection gradually moves out from the speaker’s sister, for whom “radiance is grief / shiny and polished / pitch and sap to her roots,” to seek grief’s effects elsewhere: the speaker’s father is “gentler now, / quiet,” and her son wears “on his face / . . . a strange pleasure when he says died / as if he’d seen a door in a mountain.” In Barnett’s vision, time, water, and sky supplant sudden loss with constant presence so that the missing, visible nowhere becomes invisible everywhere: “Someone resembling me has come: / No one resembles me but them: Therefore they have come.” This book of impossible sightings finds meaning in equivalents: the boiled hairbrushes, which at the beginning of the collection yield “like rice the nits / [that] rose to the surface, vanished, then / reappeared,” are reprised later in “the stew pot” where apples yield “smooth black seeds” that “keep rising to the surface.” Similarly, the book closes on another resurfacing, this time suggesting that grief’s inescapability might be recast as the poet’s calling to perpetuate what is lost: “I see it’s not all gray— / where the water rises up there’s shadow, / where the buoy is chained there’s chain and rust / and a still white bird turns sideways / like another face.” Into Perfect Spheres introduces a courageous and purposeful new voice, one that sounds long after the book’s final page.

—Penelope Cray

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The Book of Funnels
Christian Hawkey
Verse Press, $13 (paper)

All but one of the six sections of Christian Hawkey’s panoramic debut are marked off by a bold, black X situated slightly above center on an otherwise blank page. At the risk of reading too much into a design decision that may or may not have been Hawkey’s own, these Xs suggest appropriately beguiling site markers for this odd and adventurous book. Like cairns in a shifting poetic terrain, these small you-are-heres plant you, the reader, gently yet firmly in his strange and indeterminate landscapes, inviting you to wander through them. Frequently, Hawkey’s lines themselves are loose, his long sentences unabashedly run-on and meandering, as in the opening piece, “The Isle of Monapia,” resulting in the poetic equivalent of a hike through striking and uncharted (perhaps enchanted) territories. His titles underscore his interest in vistas both internal and external: “I Return to the O’s in Oblivion,” for instance, as well as “Slow Waltz Through Inflatable Landscape” and “The Art of Navigating in the Air.” Hawkey writes wonderfully of experiences both synesthetic and puzzling. “Hosannas for the Tatterdemalions,” for example, begins, “I was just standing there when it / reached out and bit me. My taste buds / went deaf,” then roams fluidly from “the banks of the Ganges” to “the corner of East Main and Plum Tree” before ending up “past the Indefatigable Islands, / inhabited by the Indefatigable Ones.” Simultaneously funny and eerie, Hawkey evokes feelings of giddy anticipation and anxious foreboding, as typified by “Green Solitude,” which begins, “No such thing as exit for the man lost / In the middle of a cornfield. / No such thing as field,” and which ends, “the sound / Of his listening was the landscape / Advancing at his approach.” Like the best possible vacation or voyage, The Book of Funnels appeals to the reader as explorer, presenting the promise of surprise and discovery.

—Kathleen Rooney

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The Lichtenberg Figures
Ben Lerner
Copper Canyon Press, $14 (paper)

Like the intricate patterns of ‘captured lightning’ to which the book’s title refers, the poems in Ben Lerner’s The Lichtenberg Figures make their mark in bursts of invention and surprise. The languages of critical theory and television collide, often with titillating and telling results: startling, gnomic ingots are scattered throughout; clichés are ripped apart and reassembled fresh and strange. While each of the poems in the book-length sequence is composed of 14 lines, the governing unit is less the sonnet than the sentence, and Lerner spring-loads one after another in order to deliver his splendidly calibrated punch. For this reason, many of the poems delight in isolation, while over the course of the book one senses an intelligence frenetically changing the subject to keep allegiances at bay, or at least on the surface, where they remain disarmingly fungible—the personal and the allusive alike boiled down to the poetic equivalent of a one-liner. So much of this poetry is smart that it sometimes unhinges itself when it strives for pure cleverness, as when the book’s cataloguing data provides one poem with its last eight lines. And then there are the relentless and tiring grammar gags: “remember the ablative case in which I keep / your tilde”; “Grenades luxuriate / in the garden of decommissioned adjectives”; “The thinkable goes sobbing door-to-door / in search of predicates accessible by foot”; “When I first found the subjunctive, she was broke and butt-naked,” and so on. All that aside, this debut is sharp, ambitious, and impressive, especially considering the poet’s age (Lerner was born in 1979). Given his remarkable skill at crafting sentences with snap, one looks forward to seeing Lerner extend the feat, making the sentence less the subject than the vehicle for a more prolonged and nuanced meditation. “I wish all difficult poems were profound,” one sonnet concludes. “Honk if you wish all difficult poems were profound.” It may mean steering into the punch line, but I’m still offering an encouraging honk.

—Jesse Lichtenstein

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The Babies
Sabrina Orah Mark
Saturnalia Books, $14 (paper)

Sabrina Orah Mark’s debut collection is uncommonly taut, an achievement made all the more remarkable given that its poems are anything but spare. Taking aftermath as their origin, these prose poems are variously populated with the fallout of a haunted imagination: walk-on characters (Bewilder, Brunibar, Asa), the specters of the World Wars (“the fuhrer’s beautiful hands”; “the soldier’s gold teeth”; “the devastated walls of this cheap metropolis”), and, of course, the babies of the book’s title, whose eerie recurrences throughout the book suggest a horror best left unspecified (“It is a feeling like what, at the end, happened to the babies”). It is easy to see how such heavily fraught subject matter runs the risk of lapsing—despite Mark’s practiced levity—into melodrama here and there (“For you to feel their beak marks would be everything”). Sometimes Mark resorts too quickly to the tricks up her sleeve: dramatis personae keep cropping up (“They call me Zillah”; “Call me Berlin”), and the emotional impact of “They kneeled inside me and called me a Jew” is undermined by repeated use of the same marsupial surrealist effect (“We hold our children in our mouths”; “Brunibar unscrews his wooden foot, and I climb gently inside”). But more often than not, Mark’s voice chills with its restraint, evoking terror through disruption and diminishment rather than through crescendo. “Hello” ends mid-sentence (“Let us tell you what it’s like to be Zillah . . . It’s like”), and elsewhere lakes are guarded, roads to town are closed, and animals cannot be heard. This muffling of scene and sound is mirrored in the speaker’s often-unnerving control (“I did not fear them until I wanted to be afraid”), but Mark also shows us that will can only govern so much. Even in this blighted landscape, love appears, intractable as ever: “I continued to love Walter B. . . ., as one loves a child who has taken the place of another”; “He said, a starving octopus has been known to eat her own heart.”

—Debora Kuan

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New and Selected Poems: 1958–1998
Gilbert Sorrentino
Green Integer, $14.95 (paper)

Just because this updated edition of Gilbert Sorrentino’s Selected Poems (1981) slips into a raincoat pocket, don’t be fooled by its size. At a time when many lushly packaged New and Selecteds underwhelm, this paperback gem delivers on its promise of amplitude. And though the reader might be excused for approaching with caution another potentially career-plumping retrospect, it is in just such a ranging collection that the tonal sureness of Sorrentino can be fully appreciated; style alters very little over 40 years when sensibility and technique are one. Sorrentino’s lens has always been bitterly clear, succinctly wry, and tenderly wise. Throughout these poems there is some sense of the fiction writer’s handle on human relations, even some sense of his better-known prose works’ Queneau-inspired experiments. But only in the poetry (and most especially in his radiant 1978 collection The Orangery) can Sorrentino’s project of lyric recovery be found. Referring to some photos of his wife and mother, the poet observes in “The Closet” that “women are lost in the void / with the old souvenirs”; he might equally be speaking of his beautifully rendered versions of the Roman poet Sulpicia, “silent as the stilled voices / Of the women who gaze through the imagination / I have blown into life yet again.” More recent works read as though the songs of Marvell (or Arnaut or Propertius) had been snatched from the air and transported to Brooklyn to be made newly immanent and contemporary: “Things are really okay when the moon is / When the moon is a pale silver disk. Right. / When her face breaks into when her face is / Creased in a tender smile.” Sorrentino’s deceptively humble undertaking (“in the poet’s song an / instant of consciousness”) is not, after all, without considerable ambition or consequence: “Whatever will become / of the lyric, / that will become / of the I.”

—Mary Maxwell

Originally published in the September/October 2005 issue of Boston Review