Black Dog Songs
Lisa Jarnot
Flood Editions $13 (paper)

If there is something strangely devotional about Lisa Jarnot’s work, it is in the poetic particulars rather than in any overarching effect. The four segments that comprise Black Dog Songs include one simply entitled “They,” whose poems serve as an index of the things “they” love: “That they loved to go on unmistaken, that they loved / to not to be gratuitous or cry, that they loved the / fortitude of yaks, that suddenly they loved the whiskey / and the sunlight and the key.” The sweeping refrain crafts a quiet insistence that, after so many iterations, seems almost a form of rhetoric: poetry that seeks to put forth and persuade. Though rooted in the quotidian, these poems are peppered with both natural and fantastic images that wryly challenge the high seriousness of the poetic enterprise: “The chicken wing factory is lit up in flames / and the flames are the wings of the little hot chickens.” But for all the attention paid to form and line, there is something missing in the transitions. Since Jarnot’s work relies heavily on cadence and repetition, we might look to music to explain what is puzzling about Black Dog Songs. The late 20th century saw the rise of the hit single and subsequent decline of the album as an art form as fewer musicians, it seemed, were capable of carefully assembling a collection. As a result, the last 20 years are rife with compilations that, while often entertaining and occasionally brilliant, never coalesce into something we might rightly call an album. While it offers the reader many engaging poems, Black Dog Songs fails to create a coherent montage. Jack Spicer once said that the book itself was a poetic form, a proposition that, had it been heeded, might have made an album out of this collection of hits.

—Chris Pusateri

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Slave Moth: A Narrative in Verse
Thylias Moss
Persea Books, $24 (cloth)

The complex success of Thylias Moss’s Slave Moth lies in how three genres—slave narrative, romance, and Bildungsroman—are fused into one narrative through a powerfully-drawn protagonist. Varl Perry, a young slave taught to read and write by her mother, imagines herself a “larva drawing its silk back and forth” as she stitches verse into stolen cloth to make “a cocoon I can wear under my dress / these first squares pinned / across my chest to change my heart / the next ones to be the underside / of my scarf those days I choose to / tie up my hair to change my mind / and then keep it from changing back.” The book’s revisionary central conceits—that not Christian salvation but authorship is the slave’s road to freedom, and that Varl’s talents, not just her body, pique Master Perry’s libido—render each of these genres a metaphor for the others. While Varl’s stitching, “the most useful / thing for thinking,” yokes slave narrative tropes to those of a writer’s education, the verse beneath her dress disturbs the plantation’s erotic power dynamics. Thus Slave Moth is not simply a romance but a study in triangulation. It is also a parable of reading: when in a climactic scene Varl’s writing draws her mother and all the narrative’s male characters around her in judgment, she asks herself, “What did this look like to them?” An inviting flirtation with Master, insulting the white women’s inferior powers? A love song to her fellow slave Dobbs? A coming into her own that her mother made possible? It is the achievement of Slave Moth that Varl’s writing is each of these. However, Moss’s prosody beats quickest with critique: in traditional resolution—which in slave narratives means freedom; in romances, marriage; and in Bildungsroman, education—her imagination slackens, and Slave Moth concludes in a vague embrace. What freedom Varl finds with the flatly drawn, near-speechless Dobbs unfortunately lacks the passion of the fraught erotics of mastering Master Perry’s language.

—Brian Teare

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This Connection of Everyone With Lungs
Juliana Spahr
New California Poetry, $16.95 (paper)

“I am large, I contain multitudes,” wrote Walt Whitman in his Leaves of Grass, promising that he would “permit to speak at every hazard, / Nature without check.” In This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, her third book of poems, Juliana Spahr sings of an expanded consciousness, of both “the specific in our bed at night” and “the globe in our mind that we didn’t see really until the twentieth-century with all its technologies and variations on the mirror.” Long, anaphoric lines, which include events from the personal and political realms, accrete across stanzas and sections, the successive clauses elaborating the lyric moment so that it contains an ever-broadening context: “And today, I am back with yous, beloveds, and still we do not speak about yesterday’s deployment of sixty-two thousand soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines to the Gulf Region that included seventeen thousand and five hundred marines and pilots, mechanics and additional warplanes, combat engineers, logistics support and loading crews. . . . We do not speak of it and instead press against one anothers reveling in the pleasure of being back together.” When, in “A Poem Written After September 11, 2001,” the poet declares that “There are these things: / cells, the movement of cells and the division of cells,” she draws a connection between the cells of the organism, the terrorist, and the prison, suggesting that we are all part of the body politic and bear responsibility for the actions of and reactions to our states. Spahr’s ambition here is more than just wordplay. Continually inviting readers to identify beyond “our skin‚ our largest organ and how it keeps us contained,” This Connection of Everyone with Lungs bids us to perceive and moreover to act on the fact that “embedded deep in our cells is ourselves and everyone else”—or as Spahr’s forefather put it, “every atom belongs to me as good belongs to you.

—Heidi Lynn Staples

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In the Dark Before Dawn: New Selected Poems of Thomas Merton
edited by Lynn R. Szabo
New Directions, $16.95 (paper)

When Selected Poems first appeared in 1959, Mark Van Doren wrote that Thomas Merton believed that “poetry at its best is contemplation—of things, and of what they signify.” At a time when poets are sometimes too quick to force significance or, on the other hand, to celebrate darkly the inability to grasp the meaning of things, it’s worthwhile to consider how there is almost no one in contemporary American poetry who sounds likes Thomas Merton: “Listen to the stones of the wall. / Be silent, they try/ To speak your / Name . . . O be still, while / You are still alive, / And all things live around you” (“In Silence”). A poet who humbly, if sometimes falteringly, demonstrates his intimacy with things and their significance, Merton can be at once strangely humorous and ecstatic, as in these lines from “Elegy for the Monastery Barn”: “Who knew her solitude? / Who heard the peace downstairs / While flames ran whispering among the rafters?” In addition to Merton’s most successful poems, this expanded selection presents samples from later and more experimental work, including excerpts from his long “anti-poem,” Cables to the Ace, as well as hitherto unpublished love poems and literary translations. Augmented with Szabo’s thoughtful and well-researched introduction, this generous edition attends to readers’ continued interest in Merton’s work since his death in 1968, but it also risks repetition and requires us to wade through some less interesting material. And consciously or not, Szabo’s editorial choices—the poems are arranged according to theme, rather than chronology—undermine our ability to read Merton’s development as a poet and suggest, perhaps correctly, that the most profitable way to approach Merton is for philosophical content before poetic artistry. Still, if Merton’s compelling and sincere engagement with the world sometimes produces regrettable results (“O peace, bless this mad place: / Silence, love this growth”—from “Love Winter When the Plant Says Nothing”), his best poems continue to read as essential acts of imaginative contemplation unhindered in their path toward clear expression.

—Jennifer Grotz

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Anabranch
Andrew Zawacki
Wesleyan University Press, $13.95 (paper)

Andrew Zawacki is a poet of startling, exhilarating capacity. At its best, the conceptual and formal subtlety of his writing evokes a complex psychological reality. In these moments Zawacki also achieves a Stevensian coolness and lightness of touch. He appears before us, comically and forcefully, as a musician adept on “a frost harmonica / settling his score with the sun.” This fugitive, vulnerable voice frequently melts (the harmonica is made of frost), carrying the speaker beyond the frontier of self-recognition: “one of me stuttered and one / of me broke, and one of me tried / to fasten a line to one of me untying it from me.” The doomed undertaking to “mortar myself to myself” is the struggle that animates Anabranch, and when the struggle feels like a struggle, Zawacki’s vital talent is bewitching. The self, for Zawacki, is subject to sudden refractions, and its faith in its own cohesiveness is mere sentiment. To simply assert this, however, as Anabranch too often does, is no less sentimental; tendentious emphasis on contingency seems anxious to reassure us that we are unimpeachably post-Romantic, sophisticated, and undeceived. The book tends to shy away from the tension between refraction and integration, and the drama of moving back and forth between these states. For this reason, Zawacki’s dismantling of the lyric “I” comes across as a static proclamation. Studied disruptions of everyday speech and an enchantment with Celanesque compound terms (“tunebroke,” “cloudwarp,” “mudsalve,” “winterstricken”) present refraction and integration in the language itself, but at the cost of hobbling the work with fastidious mannerism. These shortcomings would be less disappointing if the best parts of Anabranch were not excellent.

—DeSales Harrison.

Originally published in the November/December 2005 issue of Boston Review