Books of selected poems, especially if the writer isn’t overbearingly well-known, have a lucky feeling to them. As it happens, Christopher Howell’s first collection is called The Crime of Luck; the title refers to the coming of winter, when “Soon cold will step from hiding, / the bears stagger comically to sleep, poor / beggars die out the crime of luck.”

A typical Christopher Howell poem—but it’s not clear there is any such thing. There is a genial, self-incriminating persona, and it would be unlikely for Howell to publish random lists of words, truly embarrassing personal stories or confrontational talk poems. He might be called a metaphysical poet for all his mention of the soul, his favored emblems for which are boats, birds and kites—free to travel but needing to come back to land. There are stable frames of reference in his poems, but he’s good for a substantial surprise almost every time. There is an intractable need in Howell’s poems to appeal to the reader’s tender feelings, as he says in 1997’s “The Cry,” to implore the reader to “come to me / because I cannot come to you.”

Episodes from his Vietnam-era stint in the Navy recur in his poems, in particular the job of writing letters to the families of soldiers killed in action. The first such poem, “Dear Mrs. Terry” (1976), recounts the awkwardness, tedium, and frustration of the sailors on a ship

in the lead-hot
Gulf into which Cadet Pilot Terry shot
his plane, the impact of the catapult
socking him forward, his gear
snagging the stick. “I don’t know, Captain,
he cleared the flight deck and went down
like a goose, sir.” Fifty fathoms. Enough
oxygen for half an hour.

The poem ends with another sailor sleeping, “book / over his face, the writing of that next-of-kin letter / making a wide slow approach through the dead / chain of command.” The intense sitting-duck feeling of the metaphor of the letter approaching its writer might seem a little callous; the enjambment, though not as epochal as Donne’s lines about the bells, gets, as we all do, to the point.

Death often looms over Howell’s poems. His 1991 collection Sweet Afton speaks of the last days of an imaginary Pennsylvania town before the power company flooded it for a reservoir. (It is typical of Howell’s imagination both that the town has been named by a lover of Burns’s poems as well as that no mention of Burns appears in the work.) His early poems show the strong, sometimes overpowering influence of James Wright, and even in his later poems he sometimes drops Wright’s words like keys: blossoms are everywhere, and even iron bars threaten to burst into song. He seems to be aware of the issue; in his direct nod to Wright’s best-known line, “I Have Wasted My Life,” he counters that in his case, “I hope I haven’t wasted it.”

What else might a Howell poem be. He invented a classical Chinese poet given to parables, and his fabulist streak continues in later poems about various encounters with animals. It’s not as hokey as that sounds—what, after all, is “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” but a poem about an encounter with an animal—and in fact his 2003 poem “The Dove” is a level-headed nautical tale contemplating eating a bird that “flopped out of the sky, exhausted, onto the fantail” of a boat lost at sea for weeks. It’s no “Rime,” but it is an attractive and memorable poem, both for its modest loathing for the bird’s “scorched white plastic-seeming shit” as well as the mildly crazed fantasy that during a squall, the bird, “below in an orange crate / where he would plummet immediately into the pigeon unconscious,” might watch over and protect the ship, “fly / the entire vessel then, soar high over the spume and pitching moil,” from inside his dream. Most poets would give you one or the other, the fouling of the decks or the “darkly joyous bird asleep / and dreaming of a bird.” For Howell, the real and the ideal both appear to be necessary conditions for poetry.

A reader can be forgiven for thinking his 1997 book, Memory and Heaven, my favorite of his single collections, bears a resemblance to the quirky investigations of Dean Young, Mary Ruefle and others. Like Young and Ruefle, Howell has always grounded lightness with heavy facts. Those who seek Howell’s book out will find a poet who over time has grown more and more comfortable with surprising word choices, comparisons, and lists. He’s so sure the force of his narratives will carry the reader through to the end, so sure the feelings that come through in his poems are real and undeniable, he can risk what looks at first like irrelevance, as toward the end of the elegy “You Sailed Away, Oh Yes You Did”

Like a proton parking meter filled with mischief and stars,
like a fig bar the rain disapproves of,
like a window becoming a zip-lock bag when no one is listening.

I’d prefer that series without the clause beginning with filled, but I’ll take it as a package deal with the fig bar, token of an outright Ashberyan tendency I wouldn’t mind seeing him develop further, if it might mean more poems like 2004’s “He Writes to the Soul.” There, his native impulse to hold the reader’s attention somehow coexists with his other great will, to daydream: “Anyway, / at every crossing I kneel and say ‘Excelsior!’ / and light a little fire in a jar and drink it down, / hoping if fire’s a prayer no one will answer it just yet.” The close of the poem makes me want to encourage this fluent silliness in Howell and almost nobody else on the planet:

Don’t fret about my safety; if the weather
doesn’t suck its trigger finger while it hunts for time,
or if something huge and golden lets me have its keys,
I’ll be ok. Lake or no lake, some days I feel
perfectly disguised in front of you, like intention
around an iceberg or sunlight on the skin of the rain.
And I’m happy now, happy as a jungle, happy as a wisp
of dreaming melon and I cry only on your days off.

In a dramatic monologue from 1991’s Sweet Afton, Christopher Howell ends the speech of the town painter with what might serve as a motto for his art:

The few things I do sell
I sell for no great golden fee.
Most of my sad companions here will never know
the single object of the work
is joy.

While that’s a reasonable mission statement for small town painter and well-published poet alike, I think it puts too low a price on Howell’s inventions. Reading back through Howell’s books for this review, and prompted by his new poem, “Time Travel,” I noticed several anticipatory borrowings from popular culture in poems not included here. For example: His “monster that ate Sandusky,” included in a science-fiction anthology in 1977, was at the very least likely something in the air breathed by the creators of “The Creature that Ate Sheboygan,” a 1979 computer game. The poem “Chance,” with its weasel “rattling the stargate of an infant’s sleep,” is from the 1985 collection Sea Change, and therefore only predicts what most men think of James Spader. And as for his appalling 1997 pun title “Christian Science Minotaur”—the band of the same name that began recording in 2002, it turns out, may be able to plead that their use of the name is merely a literary reference.

Dreamless and Possible is Howell’s ninth volume. He teaches English and Creative Writing at Eastern Washington University, and most of his books have been published in the northwest; by his current press, University of Washington, by Eastern Washington U’s now-closed press, by Idaho’s Lost Horse Press, and by L’Epervier, then of Seattle. He’s no more a regional writer than his fellow northwesterner the late William Stafford was, though. I first came across his work in The Gettysburg Review; his near-annual appearances justify a subscription.

Howell writes as if he believes both that art cannot be willed, and that it never comes without a sacrifice. This refusal of the will sometimes gives his work a self-diminishing quality, and it is not always clear that his best, most characteristic poems are on offer here. For example, of the 25 poems he’s published in The Gettysburg Review in the last decade, by my count he’s only collected ten in books so far. My favorite poem of 2006 is one of those uncollected poems: “Rachel,” a psychological thriller monologue in the voice of a patient of Freud’s who’d lost her child. Maybe he’ll put it in the next book. In this book there are nine or ten poems at least as good as that one, one of which, “The New Orpheus,” is an elegy for his daughter Emma. The poem is both beautiful and excerptible, but it would be irresponsible to just pull a quote. It’s worth getting to the end of the book to read the last three lines in context.

As devastated and clear as Howell can be, singer of sad songs is not exactly the writer I see when I look at his work in the round. That character I see more clearly in one of the new poems. “Letting Things Go” relates a trip the poet took in his baby-poet pre-first-book days to the annual conference of John Muir Publications, a press run by an engineer-hippie carrying on the family name of the legendary environmentalist. (JMP’s best-known book remains How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive.) Ever the ambitious poet, Howell secures an invitation to read for the “principal mavens of the group”:

We gathered around a huge table out
under the stars
and I opened my manuscript…
but first, Muir said, we should “get into the mood”
and began to load his pipe with a weed
and Psilocybe Mexicana mixture which everyone
smoked until their eyes were huge, pulsing zeros.

Then I read. It was like hollering
into a vat of butter, like singing to Martians
about the stock exchange.

When, after three hundred years, I finished,
they nodded into themselves, looked around
and went off toward the beach.
Two days later the managing editor collared me
and said, “Well, they thought I should talk to you
because we’re about the same height. So,
it’s like this, we know you’re a good poet
and we’d really like to help you out, but
you’re into holding onto things

and we’re into letting things go.

Missing brother
Her child’s late father
Recurring name
(A city they made a movie about as a joke)
Carnivals
Blood oranges
Winter as the unmentionable omnipresent (like skyscrapers and hostility in New York)
Vanished sea
Chuckling, disgusted
“Gods are so cool”

I’ve been trying to put my finger on what in Paula Cisewski’s Ghost Fargo keeps getting to me. I make lists, but the lists are subjects, and names of subjects are more like paint chips than the eventual mood of a room, and besides, lists are overrated. I reread the book from back to front to see if any unresolved drama in the work (such as the first few lines of the list above) is leading me to read warmth where what might equally be there is what Roland Barthes called writing degree zero. The vibe (what is it) is still there. I turn to other readers for help. She loves language, one says, and she is unsentimental. Ok. Another, a poet I read, says: fate (yes) and that, in her first book, when she makes an interesting leap, she doesn’t always give the reader time and space to understand it. Another critic sees jumps too. I don’t see jumps, though. I show her work to my friends, but my friends don’t want to hear about poetry not by them. Fuck ‘em.

You think everyone knows
all about a thing so you don’t

write it down, don’t say.
Everybody does know

about it. It is difficult.
In the backs of our minds,

while several separate
groups of humans try

to entertain one another,
to be novel or bright,

a similar thought spider crouches.

(beginning of “Vintage Blue Anywhere”)

I can tell you what I don’t like: now and then she mixes up transitives and intransitives, uses an adjective as a noun (“his foolish heroic”), overdoes it with the praise of disappointment and thrift stores, or commits an asinine bout of all over the page a la cummings. And then, just as I’m ready to set the book aside, she issues an apology in the form of telling a truth, not a great one, only so-so, but recognizably true all the same:

O good parents of Fargo!

How you fret, and yes!

Your teens are smoking weed

in the Taco John’s parking lot,

all the windows rolled and fogging.

(The dusk is not funny, Paula. Don’t be an ass.)

(from “the poor choruses”)

Everybody wants the credibility that comes with being real, but very few people put up with all the crap being real requires. Incidentally, I learned recently that the Wikipedia munchkins monitor articles there for “peacock words”—unsubstantiated terms of praise. I bring it up because the word true as I’m using it is sounding more like a peacock word to me than best or greatest usually do. It probably embarrasses the poet, who is quick to give away any truth-gotten gains: “Oh, sincerity. Let’s not / train our grief to resemble a parlor trick.” A sincere person would say that, wouldn’t she. Yes, but only an awesome writer would change the subject like so:

Recall The Loverboy girls.

The Loverboy girls! A triumvirate
Strut through the mezzanine
in their groupie band T-shirts,
festooned with bandanas!
Now, I am happy again.

(from “the poor choruses”)

It would be an achievement along the lines of widening the frame on Larry Clark photographs or following the interview subjects of “Heavy Metal Parking Lot” home if Cisewski simply stacked up 90 pages of the happy and unhappy dumb things kids do in small Midwestern cities, and it would probably sell a lot of copies. This would be a hypothetical book. The book Cisewski actually wrote does something else.

Are all mothers headless
like mine?
How she hated
to see her face
in a photo. It never
turned out right.
She Exacto knifed it.
She made a neat box
of nothing there.
Sometimes hair rollers
floated above the void,
sometimes a spoon aimed at it.
Mother, we are new in Fargo
and cannot show this album
to prospective friends.

(from “Ode to Tethers”)

Cisewski has the fun and horror of telling the truth about herself and the city and everyone around her, and at the same time she reconciles herself to the good and the bad, at some cost. It doesn’t look easy. It reminds me of some writers I usually think of as inimitable: Bishop, Schuyler, Wright (fils).

Consider: the artist who was famously ironic

about being ironic. By each show’s end,
the whole audience felt stupid. We loved it!

But some of the crowd was only pretending,
you find out much later. It’s no wonder,

when even the family cat’s on
Prozac, we’re tired of emotion in art.

(middle of “Vintage Blue Anywhere”)

Speaking of the good and the bad: that bit about the cat is probably not immortal poetry. I accept it because by this point in the book I’m conditioned to expect something likely. As when she suddenly discloses some kind of medical intervention, then lets the inland sea of her discretion close over it: “The nurse who has to read the journal I have to keep / tells me I am a good writer and I begin to like her some.” As when, in a poem about visitors to the zoo providing orangutans with lit cigarettes, she pays homage to Russell Edson’s primates inadvertently or on purpose, and then backs away from the experience. As when she follows the apparent platitude “Sometimes dusk / is just a day’s punch line” with a few lines that feel strong as a punch:

In the darkening I lie beside my love.
Steeped in separate pasts,

we muster together one
good, deep laugh.

(from “the poor choruses”)

I’m resigned to the fact that for now I don’t know what makes me want to reread this book. Maybe it’s just one of the best books of a very good year not over yet, one in which there’s about as much time to reflect as Cisewski gives at the end of “Vintage Blue Anywhere”:

That antique sadness is the new
inside joke. It’s irrevocable, like when driving home

one night, the stranger who pulls up to the red light
next to you is weeping, both your windows

rolled up. You just begin to have a human reaction,
and then the light’s green.

Louise Glück’s poems are really good at feeling bad. In “Retreating Figure,” the best poem in her Pulitzer-winning collection The Wild Iris, Glück imagines what God might say about His absence. Her best known poem remains “Mock Orange,” a one-page lyric in which she says of the flowers in the title, “I hate them. / I hate them as I hate sex.” Ararat, the book she wrote between those two strange intensities, is my favorite work of hers. The plainspoken tendency in American poetry is never sharper nor darker:

My sister and I reached
the same conclusion: the best way
to love us was to not
spend time with us.

(from “Animals,” Ararat)

Ararat centers around mourning the death of the father; I intentionally don’t say Glück’s father. Glück always means the definite article and the declaration of importance the word the implies. In a Glück poem, you feel what you’re told to feel, on the double. I mean that as praise. Glück can be amazing, a catharsis machine, the true minimalist who gives not as little as possible but as little as necessary.

Where I start qualifying my praise is where she cuts short investigating what prompts all the depressing rage:

Long ago, I was wounded. I lived
to revenge myself
against my father, not
for what he was—
for what I was: from the beginning of time,
in childhood, I thought
that pain meant
I was not loved.
It meant I loved.

(from “First Memory,” Ararat)

It might have meant both those things, actually. There’s no room in Glück’s decisive poetics for ambivalence, though—especially when it comes to emotion—and that puts a limit on how profoundly she can affect readers. 


A Village Life is Glück’s eleventh book. The anxious insistence on isolation has achieved its aim. The conflicts at the heart of her best work are dormant here. The speakers of these poems are wistful, detached, not overpowering or freaked out. This passage from “Before the Storm” is typical:

No sound. Only cats scuffling in the doorways.
They smell the wind: time to make more cats.
Later, they prowl the streets, but the smell of the wind stalks them.
It’s the same in the fields, confused by the smell of blood,
though for now only the wind rises; stars turn the field silver.

For the longest time I thought Glück stood for everything I couldn’t tolerate in American poetry. What little of her poetry I’d read struck me as not only premeditated, but also arrogant. She clearly rejected joy, happy surprise, I’ve already mentioned sex, not to speak of the small pleasures—unexpected turns of phrase, stray details. Eventually it dawned on me that she might be writing with something other than pleasure in mind. Something greater, to her mind.

One night that summer my mother decided it was time to tell me about
what she referred to as pleasure, though you could see she felt
some sort of unease about this ceremony…
(from “At the River”)

Glück can be seen as part of a broader trend in American culture—the cult of the aspirational insult. You may have heard about it in coverage of Neil Strauss’s dating manual, The Game, in which hapless men are instructed to get the attention of attractive women by insulting them. The more attractive the woman is, the greater the insult has to be. It’s called negging. It works on men too. For that matter, it can work on a whole society at once.

Does negging lead to a close connection, a truer understanding, real love? Is that question for real? What it leads to is power. To some extent, you can see patterns of negging in the work of a lot of writers enjoying critical favor now, especially the poets—what is Frederick Seidel but a walking neg? but there are more than traces of this withholding tendency in less controversial and arguably greater, more successful writers, from to Anne Carson to Franz Wright. This is to say that in itself negging as a literary strategy is neither good nor bad. When it’s the only emotional color available to a writer, though, it’s bullying.

After The Wild Iris, Glück’s work takes a turn for the vague. In The Village Life, she’s still got the will to pass off her brutal streak as candor:

No one really understands
the savagery of this place,
the way it kills people for no reason,
just to keep in practice.

That’s fine. But the commanding tone loses its credibility when she uses it to speak untruths:

But no signal from earth
will ever reach the sun. Thrash
against that fact, you are lost.

If you think signals from earth radiating away from the earth reach the sun constantly, please be assured you are not lost.

The command that we associate with Glück is a product of will and ingenuity. We believe her, when we believe her, even when we have no way to know whether she’s right, because she makes a point of stopping short, of heading off questions. It’s all or nothing, which is great when the bets pay off, disastrous when they don’t. The lines quoted above are among the shortest in the book. It may be that this is her way of signaling that in these poems she’s trying to speak in voices other than her own. It doesn’t work. The price of developing a commanding voice over several books is that now she always sounds exactly like herself.

A few themes recur—moldy produce, men who alternate between complete availability and total withdrawal, adolescent pre-sexual flirtation, disappointed hopes. “In the Café” is the most like her best work, a narrative about a man who “falls in love a little too easy,” a serial monogamist vampire who becomes not what his lovers are, “but what they could be / if they weren’t trapped in their characters.” Afterwards, when the women complain to their next lovers about “how amazing it was, / like living with another woman, but without the spite, the envy,” Gluck’s follow-up is everything we want from her:

And the men tolerate this, they even smile.
They stroke the women’s hair—
they know this man doesn’t exist; it’s hard for them to feel competitive.

And she’s entitled to mourn the loss of youth, as in “Walking at Night,” which begins “Now that she is old, / the young men don’t approach her” and ends recalling “the body she had as a young woman, / glistening under the light summer clothing.” The subject comes back again in “Crossroads,” where the speaker addresses her body, “it is not the earth I will miss / it is you I will miss.” Fair enough. But does she have to be a spoilsport and remark to someone in love, “Just be glad you were in bed, / where the cries of love drown out the screams of the corpses.” Do we still have to listen?

Reading A Village Life, I had the sense that no one had the nerve, or maybe the necessary affection, to say that the problems with this book are not trivial. Surely someone among the advance readers, hearing Gluck’s rhetorical questions, must have said no?

It’s not Pavlova’s fault; her poems get to the point quickly. The second poem in this collection of 100 poems begins, “My parents were virgins. / At twenty-two, even then it was unusual.” The poem serves as an introduction to Pavlova’s sense of humor as a kind of parallelism:

It was scary for them to make me.
It was weird for them to make me.
It was painful for them to make me.
It was funny for them to make me.
And I absorbed:
Life is scary.
Life is weird.
Life is painful.
Life is very funny.

Pavlova is all of the above. It’s fair to observe that the excerpt above is on the thin side. It’s also a direct descendant of the passage in Mayakovsky’s “A Cloud in Trousers” where he counts the hours he sits waiting for his love, and for this echo I let the slightness slide.

In isolation, her shockingest lines, “May I erase with my lips / your exclamation point?” may sound like a blooper from Austin Powers, but in the poem it appears to be a tender moment from a lucky marriage, not aggressive seduction kitsch. Some will be put off by the instant appeal to sexuality, and many will find her too cute in places (“I walk the tightrope. / A kid on each arm / for balance”). I’m not sure. Despite the eagerness to please there’s still a necessary indifference here, what Pavlova calls a “dose of contempt” necessary to maintain dignity under adverse conditions:

without which
you cannot flip a woman on her back
to make her flounder like a turtle,
to make the heartless fool realize:
she cannot flip back on her own.

In the three to eight lines of a typical Pavlova poem, she takes a loaded and universal scene—the couple in bed, the mother nursing, the poet in front of the page—and plays it like a game of chance: Sometimes it will end in exclamations of joy, sometimes in ellipses of knowing loneliness, sometimes in irritable question marks. I don’t imagine I’ll be rereading this book indefinitely, but I know I like this much of its emulation of life: that despite the uncertainty of the outcome, the odds favor the house. And as at a casino, everywhere you turn there are new opportunities to lose yourself, emphasis on lose downplayed:

Why is the word yes so brief?
It should be
the longest,
the hardest,
so that you could not decide in an instant to say it,
so that upon reflection you could stop
in the middle of saying it.

Her fastest starts are her most persuasive: “No love? Let us make it!” There’s more here of Mary Barnard’s versions of Sappho, their clarity and turns of spirit, than the mystic sing-alongs of the various Englishers of Rilke or Rumi. The details she chooses to fill out her frameworks have the strange offhandedness of life seen sideways:

A beast in winter,
a plant in spring,
an insect in summer,
a bird in autumn.
The rest of the time I am a woman.

I like the feeling of being an insect in the summer, then of feeding on that insect in the fall before flying away. I don’t think I’d ever been conscious of those feelings before reading this poem, and in exchange for that new experience I accept how flat that last line almost is. I don’t even mind the blandly obvious poems that pop up here and there—new feelings are rare.

New feelings have to look a little like old ones not to be rejected out of hand, and Pavolva’s poems look like poems, each very much a formal occasion, as governed by convention as a four-panel comic strip. The eight-liners, for example, usually break up into four two-line sentences. I imagine younger Russian poets are already playing a version of Garfield-Without-Garfield with her work, recombining the opening gambit of one of her poems with shuffled middles and ends of others; she’s that reliable, formally. As usual, though, the joke would be on these imaginary younger poets: what one finds in poem after poem is that there is no lyric-I that feels as good to inhabit as the one in love with the imaginary-You. “The first kiss in the morning / tastes like the first kiss on Earth.”

Poetry is famously easy at daybreak, though. If there’s a crisis in how to read Pavlova, it’s that without the grit of specific difficulties and satisfactions, her allusions to the frustrations and victories of life and love might come off as a mere simulation. Though reality effects abound, there’s very little here by way of proof-of-life aside from a stray mention of the Chechen war. This isn’t as serious an objection as it sounds, though. (Imagine saying William Carlos Williams didn’t have enough dust bowl drifters in his work, or that O’Hara forgot New York labored under skyscrapers.) What matters in the lyric moment is that an intense feeling come through quickly and arrestingly. Pavlova hands off the goods in a few lines time after time: “May the summer last / as a prison term / of farewell delights, / caresses on the doorstep.” It’s not a perfect poem in English but as crystallizations of romantic longing go, that ambivalent happy trapped feeling looks genuine from here.

I want to affirm that it’s ok to be wary of translation. Consider what in the movie business can be called the Miramax effect, where fundamentally un-alien American cultural productions are dressed up as good-for-you imports.

If only I knew from what tongue
your I love you has been translated,
if I could find the original,
consult the dictionary
to be sure the rendition is exact:
the translator is not at fault!

Her translator seems only partly aware how crucial it is that she never sound like a book we’ve already read, or an old movie for that matter—she has to sound exactly like herself, not at first like an aristocrat and then like an immigrant, neither tabula rasa nor fantasy, and if possible never like an American poet. Seymour acquits himself well enough. There are a few flat-out wrong-sounding poems (“But the customs fellow did not speak / a word of ancient Greek”) but mainly it survives, the illusion that Pavlova speaks something like plain American which cats and dogs can read.

It would be a mistake to leave the reader with the impression that the important thing about Pavlova’s poetry is that her language approaches transparency or that she manages her persona to bewitch the reader. Not guilty on all counts. It would also be unfair to let allowances for translation lead to an overstatement of her accomplishments. But there are not many American poets risking as much on such small lyric moments, and almost none who will let the moments fall however they may. As a Russophile O’Hara put it in Personism, they do may. Pavlova is worth a look for that alone.

Johnson was talking about Milton, but it’s not Milton who makes this passage readable more than two hundred years later. It’s that Johnson knew something about starving and being cast aside. I don’t mean to invoke the test of time at the expense of the right now of reading. I’m simply saying: all a reader can do is take every poet seriously.

I take Cornelius Eady’s poetry most seriously when he puts it forward as autobiography, as in the prose poems about his father’s death and his mother’s subsequent difficulty demonstrating that her common law marriage entitles her to the house they lived in. It makes me uneasy—what’s the reader, a poverty tourist? a guilt-tripper?—but these are accomplished poems, where the unbearable tension makes him work every angle he can find. In “Motherless Children,” for example, Eady recounts a visit to the Office of Social Services:

What did I say or do? Who knows, but I do know this look she’s giving me, after telling me that there’s no place for my mother’s well-being in their guidelines, that as far as they’re concerned, she isn’t even legally a part of my family. I know this look. This woman wants to observe a screamer, a ripper, she wants her dreams of a babbling monkey to rise.

You’re reading that right. He calls himself a babbling monkey, then projects the insult onto the clockwatcher, then hands the experience over to the reader, list price twelve dollars in 1995. He’s selling a performance of contained rage, and it’s worth every penny. Some readers will assume the speaker of this poem is on their side. Some other readers will want to know whether he thinks they give him “this look.” Still other readers will have enough experience of “this look” to know if he bends the truth even slightly. He holds his tongue.

I get uneasy when I connect this retailing of his mother’s potential homelessness with his newer poems about the difficulties of maintaining a vacation house. But then, Eady has always been all business. In one of the earliest poems in his new and selected, Hardheaded Weather, Eady repeats the slogan: “NO MORE POETRY FOR POETS.” Another early poem has as its refrain: “Money for reading poems.” In “Hawker,” he describes getting ready for work:

I put on dog’s teeth,
An Afro
With a silver switchblade
Just
Peeking from the top.
Then the loincloth.
I oil my body.
I walk to a street corner
And sell poems
From a paper bag.

He’s aware from the very beginning of both the stereotype threat he faces as a black poet, as well as the connection between risking his persona and writing his own reward. The implications of that won’t emerge clearly in his work until his fourth book, but even at the beginning he shows a flair for closing lines: “The idiot smiles at the man’s girlfriend / And the unfortunate woman / Smiles back.” And there’s this, from a poem written in 1981, before word processors blunted the physicality of the words cut and paste:

And you,
Watching me
Cut and paste, you
Can’t tell
If you’re
In or
Out, if
You should
Worry
Or laugh.

Worry.

With Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, winner of the Academy of American Poet’s Lamont Prize, the cartoonish quality acknowledged in the title of his first collection, Kartunes, is mostly gone. He replaces the jokey exaggerations with effectively erotic ones, many about women’s legs, as in the poem that closes, “The same thing that draws us together / has ruined all these dresses.” It’s in these poems that the narratives start to come back to family, which is to say, to money and home. The poem that introduces his father as a character, “The Good Look,” is the poem that introduces the subject of packing up and leaving for good. It’s a level up moment, and Eady knows it:

My father
Stops at that portal,
And, though totally mistaken,
Takes a hard look at his house.

Everything the words so long were ever
Meant to imply
Is in this look,
A look that, when shown to me later,

Secondhand,
As part of a story with a
Happy ending,

Nevertheless
Raises the ante.

From here on, nearly every line has a confrontation, an unexpected combination, or some other evidence that nothing is ever easy. Poetry is not only melodramatic non-fiction broken into strong-stressed lines, but it does include it. I have no reason to doubt these hard stories are true. For that matter, I don’t know whether Eady is drawn to this material because he can write it perfectly, or because he knows that it will sell. Both, I hope.

In the nine fine sentences of “Almost Grown,” he gets to the core of his sister’s repetitions of their father’s behavior, and the rage it creates in his father: “He will never try this hard again to tell anyone how much he loves them. With his belt, my father tries to tell my sister what he knows a man is capable of, but all he does is tell her fortune.” Or when, visiting his father in the hospital, he responds to the order to look for some cash left lying in the room by saying to himself, “I see just what I expect: tongue depressors, baby oil, the diabetic candy he sniffed and left by the side of the road. If there was any cash there, it is long gone, a secret boon for some nurse or orderly, a justifiable tax for a hard-ass patient.”

He moralizes as much as these quotes suggest, but he’s secure enough with his point of view to let others speak. When he talks about his own actions, he mentions what he imagines other people will think. He makes a good case why. In “The Grin,” he quotes two lines from a plainclothes cop who stops him hurrying through the airport in Norfolk, Virginia: “Will you cooperate?” and “See you soon.” Despite Eady’s apparent one-to-one identity with the narrator of these poems, it’s possible to read him as constantly holding his tongue. He may be.

He actually uses the phrase “I hold my tongue” twice in “Lucky House,” the new to go with the selected. If you told me two years ago I’d admire a book about buying a vacation house, I’d have been surprised. But house is a key word to understanding Eady, or any American. In the selected part of the book, Eady tells his father that “The house has gone down,” and later, he sits in a car “watching my sister’s house.” In a poem from Autobiography of a Jukebox not included here, his mother’s giving up on her collard-and-tomatoes victory garden prompts these lines:

You can’t have nothing, she tells us,
Is the motto of our neighborhood,
These modest houses
That won’t give an inch.

In the earlier poems, when you start to root for him, he smiles and backs away. These new poems feel closer and warmer:

Under the bedroom
floor

There is
a long
rumble,
a small
explosion
every 20 minutes
called a furnace.

An early Eady poem praises William Carlos Williams’s inventions while looking sideways at his failure to appreciate jazz. Neither the prosody nor the pacing of the revelation in these short lines come near Williams for intensity, but what does that matter when “the John Birch Society / Has adopted our section of the highway.”

The selections here are fine, and could have been finer. The previously uncollected poems delay the appearance of his major work, for example, and he’s underweight in material from his best books. While he includes more than half the poems from You Don’t Miss Your Water, an almost-perfect perfect-bound chapbook of short prose pieces, the only plausible excuse for not including all of it is that it’s still in print and selling. He includes less than a quarter of the poems from The Autobiography of a Jukebox, a full collection of poems about musicians, performance-friendly accounts of racially fraught confrontations, and short prose pieces about his family after his father’s death. It looks at first like You Still Don’t Miss Your Water. It’s actually Eady’s most substantial book, second only to the present volume as an introduction to his work. (If you like Hardheaded Weather, find Autobiography next.) The poems he chooses from Brutal Imagination are all from the title sequence, spoken in the voice of the imaginary black man accused by a white woman (Susan Smith) of her own crime—driving her car into a lake and drowning her children. The intensity of the situation comes through, and the poems are okay, but it’s far from his best work, and not an ideal close to the book.

That ideal close would be Eady’s contribution to the subgenre of poems, begun by Langston Hughes’ “Theme for English B,” that argue into being a space for black writers in historically-white college classrooms. In “Why Do So Few Blacks Study Creative Writing?” he grapples with what to tell a young woman student who wants to know “if all music / Begins equal, why this poem of hers / Needed a passport, a glossary, // A disclaimer.” The rhetorical question he asks himself is exactly the conflict he bravely takes on with each new poem:

Really, what
Can I say? That if she chooses
To remain here the term
Neighborhood will always have
A foreign stress, that there
Will always be the moment

The small, hard details
Of your life will be made
To circle their wagons?

There lay the guinea pigs. There lay the guinea pigs and they waited with blood around their mouths like my sister. There lay the guinea pigs and they smelled bad in the cave. There lay my sister and she swelled and ached and throbbed. There lay the guinea pigs and they ached all over and their legs stuck straight up like beetles and they looked depraved and were blue under their eyes as from months of debauchery.

Before you ask what in God’s name is happening, note the anaphora and the beautifully managed variation in the length of the sentences. And again, before putting together the complete picture of the scene, take in the physical details (“legs stuck straight up like beetles,” “blue under their eyes,” “blood around their mouths,” “they smelled bad,” “swelled and ached and throbbed”) and pause to admire the cinematic widening of the lens. Each sentence is a shot, connected closely enough to the one before to ground the reader in the scene, while just incrementally different enough to boil the reader alive without causing alarm. Like Bjork, or Werner Herzog, Berg is infatuated with the intense perversity of the world, will and representation, and like them, Berg knows to make her case as beautiful and wild as possible. Berg is especially good at giving her bizarre fantasies a polish more often associated with ordinary sadistic blandness.

There lay the guinea pigs and ached and were made of dough. There lay the guinea pigs beside the knives that would slice them up like loaves. And my sister with lips of blueberries, soil and mush. In the distance, the siren bleated inhumanly. That is where the guinea pigs lay and waited with blood around their mouths and contorted bodies. They waited. And I was tired in my whole stomach from meat dough and guinea pig loaf and I knew that they would take revenge on me.

I’m taken in here by the lullaby repetitions, the drowsy (wounded) repose that if I’ve seen before it was through a peephole in a museum in Philadelphia, Duchamp’s Étant Donnés. This restrained presentation of provocative material feels completely convincing to me, as does the strange plasticity of the guinea pigs, and the mounting creeping creepy feeling. (If you’ve ever stood near an overpopulated guinea pig hutch, the sound is the one thing missing from Berg’s description—an almost electronic oodling, like water rushing back through loosely stacked stones—otherwise she nails it.)

Not every piece here requires of the reader a headlong acceptance of the grotesque, though there is a baseline post-psychological sense that anyone’s and everything’s existence is always on the threshold of some crazed appetite disorder. I don’t subscribe to that particular anxiety, though I do admire how Berg makes art out of it. A snake stalking a deer, the pain of the grass the deer chews, a terrible and evil horse one poem’s speaker is delighted to have as an enemy—this profound identification with power and will and their obverse helplessness is thrilling to behold, even at its silliest:

The substances are fermenting, throats are corroding and bubbling, things are rumbling and crumbling behind us. Adrian carries the copper snake patiently cautiously in the muddy palms of his hands. Out of a slit in the wool glows pink flesh. But we walk blinded toward the still-smoking planet that lies torn and crushed near the ruined wall on the outskirts of the city.

With all those snakes and slits, no wonder the planet is smoking.

Restraint is one of those code words in American criticism that needs to be reclaimed from the debris of past poetry wars; where restraint is lacking, no amount of gorgeous weirdness saves these poems. Unfortunately, there’s no way to quantify or codify what exactly constitutes restraint, and it may prove to be a fatally subjective quality. Nevertheless, I see restraint in Berg’s poems that allude to wasp-parasite infestations as “liplarvae,” in scenes of morbidity where lyricism and the clinical meet in blue flesh, where if there is puking going on, it happens calmly and indifferently. I see less restraint, or none, in her scenes of gathering severed limbs (even those of dolls), in screams and descriptions of explosions, in lines that in their plainness and anger come too close to ordinary raving: “We are born out of sewers, out of horrifying dough beyond good and evil. It smells like ghosts, it smells of slop flesh, it smells of placenta and uranium.” Not to put too fine a point on it, but speak for yourself.

For many readers, this will be a distinction too far. The goth glory will either be the rallying cry or the cue to avoid. This is a shame, because in much of her early work Berg is capable of intense compressions of feeling not seen in nature writing since D.H. Lawrence. These feelings are generally of the head-down dark warmth variety, as of guinea pig caves and terrifying horses, but occasionally they come out into the light, as in this rare completely successful short poem:

SHARD

Where one by one you turned my faces up
toward the sun’s surface
and drank them like deer water.

While I know almost no Swedish, the en face presentation here encourages me to believe that Gorannson is a competent translator; his edition of the poems of Henry Parland has a similar clarity and brio. With Deer is Gorannson’s second take on the Berg opus; Remainland, a selection from four books, appeared in 2005 from Action Books, a press run he runs with his wife, former Constant Critic Joyelle McSweeney. Judging from the contents of Remainland, someone ought to commission Gorannson to translate the rest of Berg’s second collection, Dark Matter,  in which the prose poems shift from nature goth to sci-fi goth, while someone else ought to visit Berg and encourage her to leave off the unsatisfying lyrics of her two more recent collections (“Aerodrome,” copied here in its entirety, is typical: “High traffic / Plane on plane / forced flight / cockviolent”) and try prose again.

The publisher bills the book as a sort of mystery, but there’s very little Bohince doesn’t say all at once. When the speaker is born her father’s in jail; when he gets out he remakes himself as a farmer in a valley, probably in Pennsylvania, giving his daughter a lonely, possibly motherless childhood among animals and wilderness. The father is nearly wordless, and the speaker mixes prayer to an absent god with conversation with her present father. There are moments of tenderness and beauty, but these are overshadowed by a persistent feeling of sorrow and abandonment, not to mention a folk belief that the father’s trespasses will be punished. And at some point, the father is robbed, shot and killed by his farmhands. They go unpunished. Later, the daughter returns to the farm to make a life, and learns that her neighbor is surviving a similarly harrowing story. It may sound simple, but it can’t have been for the ones living through it. Bohince’s verse carries the incredible weight of its events without the relief of before and after.

Don’t be mean to me.
Don’t make me look at the swamp
of his body, come spring,
when the job of my childhood was staring:
jaw unhinged, mind agog
at the whitewash of trillium—
whorl of three leaves with a solitary rising flower,
world sickening on the vine,
buds, hoary with sugar, swaying
like appraising hands.

(from “Pond”)

Certain features recur – there are usually animals, plants, water, the outdoors or barns, the daughter, the father – and are never generic, are always palpable presences with idiosyncratic histories. Loved individuals. It takes a while to get to know why Bohince is talking about, say, sheep and deer, but it comes clear in the intense association she makes between the animals and the speaker’s father, even as she acknowledges that it’s possible she’s only imagining it:

And though I can still see pretty hooves lifting,
feel the purchase of the nozzle
firing fresh water,

I must have dreamt it.

Weren’t we always cold?
We wore no wool, had no money from schemes
of shearing and selling the stuff.

And if there were deer, wouldn’t they have leapt over?

(from “Landscape with Sheep and Deer”)

The tension between real and false memory is already well-charted, and can’t account on its own for the magnetic quality of these poems, though Bohince does handle that tension well. I’m more attracted to the strange word-to-word physicality of her lines, in which everything is smudged, humming or glimmering, about to be crushed or broken, split in two by lightning, shot, drowned, shrunken, slackened, spinning, lifting, mucked or just standing, bruised, “alarmingly still.” The speaker’s relation to all this incipient physical excitement is often bashful, but the mournful undercurrent of erotic longing does come up to the surface occasionally, as in a poem recalling feelings of lust for the young man who may have committed the murder:

I see John in his flowered shirt
chiseling shingles off the roof over my bedroom,
him rainbowed there, in oil and tar,

the rainbow, the memory
dwindling to one sexual minute caught in the sunlit
hollow of his throat, pool deepening

to soil’s color by August,
my earth, I imagine, as he turns the fields in autumn,
my sunlight memorizing his body

(from “When I Think of Love”)

Rainbowed is fantastic, as are the oil and tar, the sunlit hollow, the anaphora joining earth and sunlight. The blankness of “one sexual minute” is forgivable, and there are moments of telegraphy needing forgiveness throughout. They’re easy to forgive, though, in light of how much the reader has to hold together – the extreme sensations, the way some sentences run several stanzas and others run just to the end of the line, the piecemeal story. It does all hold together. Bohince’s poems avoid foregoing their conclusions, neither understandable in an instant nor hermetic.

The poems that hold together best in Bayonet Woods, curiously, are the ones that appear at first to have nothing to do with the narrative at all. “Where Radio Fails” considers animals as a form of entertainment or prophecy, the speaker looking and listening at nature with all the absorption of a spectator at a sporting event:

Weird cables of the sycamore rattle.

And if the interference of finches on those self-same branches
sends no comfort, no wonder:
those mutants, half-born and flustered,
have no plan for winter.

Meanwhile, the snow geese are flying.

Legs folded, black straps tucked under, they are
winners, bodies clearly superior.

Finches as mutants – nice. Elsewhere, she describes the miracle of the loaves and fishes as if it took place in a cannery, “ordinary, robotic.” Bohince is aware of the distant quality – one poem says it would be better to “woo outrage the way / I woo sorrow” and no doubt it would, except for these poems, which support and shade each other the way poems in poetry books ought to, and used to fairly often when James Wright and James Schuyler were writing them. That real achievement of the art, of imbuing lyrics with a life beyond the end of the poem, has been in danger of disappearing for some time, and still is. We have been living through a time of middle muddle, of too many poets dreaming they’re writing one big poem, not noticing when nothing’s getting through, or worse, accepting that condition, out of arrogance or ignorance or indifference. It’s gotten to the point again where magazines usually show a better side of the poet than the eventual book does. Not Bohince. Her poems belong together. They offer some consolation to the patient and impatient reader alike. Her encore will be eagerly awaited, but for now this book is plenty.

In her first collection, Elizabeth Bradfield cares equally about finding the middle way and about describing her experience as she finds it, a naturalist in a polluted world, a lesbian, a poet. None of these categories is what I’d call secure, exactly, so I understand her impulse to play to genre expectations while gently informing us that the reporters of the science section are not simply imagining the freaky shit that someday body-modders will use to claim their fifteen minutes on Boing Boing:

Hormonally imbalanced females of all deer species
have been known to grow antlers.

This is what I choose. Periosteum rampant on my brow
and testosterone to activate it at the pedicle.

Although writing is not communication I want to have some idea what’s going on. This is different from wanting to be told what I already know. Interpretive Work is Bradfield’s first book, and content-telegraphing titles such as “Fireflies First Seen at Age Thirty” and “No More Nature” indicate to me that she’s a little bristly about what’s expected from her. I personally could give a rat’s ass about what’s expected of other people, and I usually have a hard time getting past that self-consciousness when it turns up in the work of a new writer. Not so with Bradfield. But since this is a knives-out time, I will begin my praise of her project and its more successful iterations by taking inventory of what in this book I look past:

• Go-to rhetoric.  “Quick but not chemical, quick but not light.” “Not their shape, but their swing.” “Not allowed / to drink but must mingle, chat, smile.”"Not just the stray sequins themselves, //scattered cosmos of glamour, but the small round punches.” “Not death then, but watchfulness.” I understand that this is a book about seeing past rigid categories, but the repeated use of the not-but construction makes it harder to have a fresh insight each time. Not a thrillingly bold response to a situation, but recourse to an evasive logic that sounds like poetry because it misdirects and fatigues the reader. There are other crutch-phrases and -phrasings (beginning sentences with This or a brief apposite) but it would be enough of a sign of restraint and forbearance were Bradfield just to let the not-but go.
• Ekphrasis. At least ten of fifty-odd poems here describe photographs, specimens, and otherwise seeking distance from experience. Again, I understand that a naturalist’s uses for scientific method are at the heart of the book. It is the health of that heart I am concerned with, and while describing describing may be an exercise, it is not aerobic.
• Threes. Of these complaints this is least fair, or rather the one I’d most likely lodge against myself as well. Bradfield has a thing for threes, and who doesn’t, but use them guardedly or find yourself in a dead end, parodied, especially if the series is at all open ended. “Of eels coiled in burrows. / Of water transforming just by its increase. / Of what the fish do to take advantage.” Of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, is what comes to my mind. There are others. Threes carry force, undeniably (“deny deny deny”). Poetry is not merely gathering force, though; it also involves catching the reader unawares continuously. The subjects of Bradfield’s poems are consistently startling. Formally, she’s getting there.

Now for the good news. Bradfield’s poems are stocked full of unfamiliar words, statistically-improbable phrases, sonorous lines, shapely stanzas, endearing arguments and compelling personalities. Her recurring subjects wear much better than her recurring tropes. I am partial to her senses of incongruity, outlaw difference, and sheer perverse terror and delight in bad language, as in poems such as “Sweater for a Giant Squid” and “Cul-de-sac Linguistics,” which begins “Today, the boys call each other penis,” and ends

soaring
like kickballs on a true arc into flowerbeds

of penis tulips and pussy daffodils
that nod their heads in wild agreement
with the whorish, shit-loving lot of it.

The delight is obvious; the terror is that the boys will use this strange power of words to stigmatize the poem’s speaker and her lover. To do what Bradfield does with respect to the natural world, but without empathy. It’s a terrific poem. So too is “Concerning the Proper Term for a Whale Exhaling,” which begins “Poof my mother sighs.” Bradfield reads her sexuality in the testing questions of neighbors, administrators, and tourists the way other poets… well, no. Actually, most other poets don’t persist in a personal mission this variously.

Bradfield writes her sense of self as dynamic lovable other into the flora and fauna she and her girlfriend encounter in their work as nature guides. Neither simply identity poetry nor nature writing but a raucous, tender hybrid, her poems actually scrape through the documentaries and cartoons to achieve real empathy for, say, a manatee:

Here is what it senses: the grass is sweet,
the canal’s currents slow.
A ways off, another manatee skrills:
sweet grass, still waters, warmth.

Embodied, gestural feelings, the very gold of reading, keep coming through. Having worked as a whale-watch guide, she comes back again and again to the rise and fall:

Quick on the bow wave’s push, they rise
(though rise is not the right word for that thrust)
and we lean over the gunwale, lower our faces
to quick breaths shearing the water, position our gaze
so when one rolls, offering an eye, we meet it. Joy. Even
with all I know of apnea and thermoregulation,
of range and distribution, my shove of joy muscles up.

(“Triangulation”)

She has a touch of that sublime regret we’ve required, since forever, for how no first experience can stay fresh forever, but she has much much more of the gift for staying alive to the variations of experience. It is the gift that makes a long career, or a satisfying love. In the absence of the well-patrolled poem-of-the-month culture we’ve been told existed once, we rely on critics to recommend writers whose sense of necessary and sufficient conditions to make them reliable about delivering the goods. We ask them to place bets. I see something in this book. I hope Bradfield continues to develop and change. Nature certainly doesn’t seem to be slowing down, and we’re going to need poets like Bradfield to keep reminding us of that, and a lot else besides.

David Lawrence has a Ph.D. in literature from CUNY Graduate Center and taught at Hunter College. In 1976 he went into business and within five years became the CEO of several large insurance brokerages on Wall Street. During that time he became a professional boxer and fought on television in venues like Vegas and Atlantic City. He made a movie of his fight career, “Boxer Rebellion,” which played at the Sundance Film Festival. In 1993 he didn’t pay his taxes on a few of his accounts, losing his multimillion-dollar businesses and ending up doing a two-year bid in a Federal Prison Camp. Prior to, during and subsequent to jail he became a rapper and did three albums.

There is more, but why spoil it. The important thing to know is: he’s not kidding. The poems flesh out each of these lines, taking as much relish in insolent physicality and lean intelligence as his namesake D.H. Lawrence ever did in his poems. He’s often as winningly direct:

I like real people like my brother
And the way that he thinks it matters if the sun rises,
The morning engenders frosted flakes.

I relax reading most poetry that grounds itself in first-person assertions, and this happens to be a specialty of Lawrence’s. Among his declarations: “I am discovering the pleasure of burning my own hand on an imaginary match head”; “I am the inner tube / In blackness’s tire”; “I am the homeless man / For the MTA ad”; “I am the binocular unhappiness that stalks / The tarmac beneath the airplane wheels”; “I lie down on the beach and pretend I am a mollusk / Waiting to celebrate my reincarnation / At high tide.” As statements of feeling go, these are specific, bleak, and inviting.

Lawrence’s poetry does not stop at the borders of the self, or confine itself to the past, present, or future. He works the ubi sunt like Villon, though with a taste for cold address more like Robert DeNiro conjuring Jake LaMotta:

You were wired that night at the Japanese Restaurant.
You looked like tuna wrapped in seaweed.
Your hands were at your sides
Like you were pickpocketing yourself.

(“Steve K”)

There are issues. His weakness for simile will likely put off sticklers for clarity. Outside the boros his clipped New York diction comes off asthmatic. And then there’s the gender thing — this particular brand of machismo has tended to either go famously or flop. (These are all qualities his work shares with Eileen Myles’s, by the way.)

Your tickets to the ballet insult me. Opera is a migraine. I sit on the edge of the world with a stick poking holes in your Master’s degree. Then you put on a strip tease that turns the afternoon to denim high jinks. I admit that you have intelligent skin.

(“Metropolis”)

Where Lawrence breaks entirely with the recognizable is in his main monstrous quality, his contempt. What comes through is that he really couldn’t care less for the opinion of readers whose senses of scale and importance were formed in academia:

Wallace Stevens.
The critics make me laugh.
They think he was a big shot.
I spent more on clothes than he earned.
He wallowed in middle management’s
Wide waist like a belt.
I hired and fired insurance men
Like Stevens.
T.S. Eliot was not a CEO.
Bankers lack imagination.
There’s no money in banking
Unless you’re the bank.
I owned a whole floor on Wall Street.

(“Poet and Businessman and…”)

This boastfulness runs counter to what refined critics label “restraint,” and generally does not find the air and diamonds it needs to survive outside of the entertainment businesses. But poetry was after all once an entertainment business. If former academic Lawrence does not have an actual tattoo of Eliot’s line about aspiring to the condition of the music hall comedian, he might as well. And while I haven’t heard Lawrence’s albums, his prosody’s not as strong as his gift for self-mythology.

It is not difficult to see how poets might come to write with a bias either for objectivity or subjectivity, choosing to describe the relations of objects in the world, or alternatively to excavate the living sensual interior of dreams and secret meanings: these are both excellent ways for a poet to set him or herself apart from the rest of humanity, and if the art is good, to speak to every reader’s private wish for exaltation. Besides, if the art’s indifferent, who’ll know, and how many of those few be rude enough to say? Whereas when a poet bets the colossus on personae, writing poems as much to merchandise a character as to say something wonderful and memorable, the writer becomes a monster. Everyone in the checkout line automatically gets to feel superior. (Cough) Bukowski.

Lawrence says toward the end of the book, “There were so many things that never happened that are real,” and it comes close to a poetics. But Lexis-Nexis says otherwise about the things he says happened – the business, the hard time, the boxing, the movie, etc. This is his first collection. He’s sixty. He better not wait as long with the next book.

Gregory Pardlo’s first book, Totem, is a masterpiece of subjectivity, all qualia and stunning epithets, big feelings shaded with doubts, regrets, hesitations and guilt. It is a book with its headphones on, narrating the most amazing music, almost never letting you hear it. Where objectivist poetry vaporizes its big feelings in people-free landscapes, Pardlo’s subjectivist poetry feels all its feelings right up to the border of the interpersonal, and no further.

Those defenses protect a linguistic kingdom boasting remarkable natural resources. From the first poem, “Landscape with Intervention,” Pardlo displays a lexical density approaching Hart Crane’s:

In the clearing below the access
road, flags pop like Ps in a microphone and no one else in sight
sees the dishwasher toking in the car out back of the caterer’s,
dishrag on his shoulder like a dingy epaulette, his windshield gone
white with mist. For years he must have taken these Pennsylvania
roads with paranoiac care, rubber-necking at the yoga of chassis
beneath wrinkled sheets
of metal, fiberglass chafed and chipped, quarter panels warped
like vinyl records in the sun.

This passage offers many kinds of pleasure – heightened sense experiences (the sights, sounds, even the ordinary out-of-the-ordinary towel on the shoulder evokes a physical feeling in the reader), statistically improbable phrases (“dingy epaulette,” “rubber-necking at the yoga of chassis”), and most important to Pardlo and least important to this reader, whodunit complexity regarding the speaker’s situation and the affect it motivates. It won’t spoil the poem’s ending or the book’s to say that the situations don’t always add up to the guilt that comes through.

If guilt is in the driver’s seat of “Landscape with Intervention,” shame is asked to step outside the car in “Volume Control.” The speaker segues from recollections of blissed-out headphone days, “The dial counter-clocking notches / Only as authority’s warrant turned / The knob on my bedroom door,” to standing “cuffed / Roadside of Route 287, the tide of traffic / Rising above my head,” a humiliation he endures by imagining back to the scene of safety, “a pair / Of headphones, a microphone / In my fists.” Both earlier and later, Pardlo casts this turn to subjective experience as a retreat, the “umbilicus of headphones” something his mother (!) warns him against. She’s got a point, and Pardlo ignores it, even as he frames it with a snap: “Compromise / Is a word that follows Missouri.” For the speaker of these poems, music and the exaltation it promises are the goal, not a danger. The succinctest phrasing of this mission statement comes as a quote from Denise Levertov’s introduction to a book by Jimmy Santiago Baca: “Next time you see such a figure, / remember it is very possible he is living an inner life / at least as vivid as your own.”

That quote comes toward the end of “Soundtrack.” At ten pages, it’s the longest poem in the book. It’s also an explicit argument for Pardlo’s poetics, not to mention a little wiggy:

But Harvey, nothing changes when you’re in the car.
True that, you say, but nobody’s in the car there is no car.
Perspective drawing caused a revolution by arresting
the viewer at an unnatural point in reference to some
horizon, you say, but what happens when the horizon swells?
What if the surface was fluid like a river and you was
in it and the experience had no way of reflecting on itself?
Do fish notice tides change? I would think so, Harvey,
my ears pop in midtown elevators.
My neighborhood once felt immense
as a foreign language. Now familiar, it is brief
as a song. Soundtrack, you’ve said, is utter interiority, air
bubble in a field of attention otherwise
tied to the rails of memory and presentiment.

Pardlo has a number of contemporaries who can set this many thoughts in motion and still hold the poem together — Ange Mlinko, Daisy Fried, Drew Gardner, Brian Kim Stefans and Major Jackson come to mind, and coincidentally they all share a NJ/Phila upbringing — so maybe it’s a period quality that he exemplies. It’s more likely that he is out on his own peninsula.

Harvey is not James Stewart’s pooka, by the way. He is dorkier, and therefore cooler, than the speaker. He provides insight into Spike Lee’s camera techniques, he comments on the history of soundtracks, and most importantly, he provides comic relief from the speaker’s intensity. After Pardlo starts riffing on Legos, Joseph Cornell, Germanic grammar and Ezra Pound, Harvey speaks up:

Money, aint shit about you dramatic.

Germanic.

Money, ain’t shit about you germanic.

It’s a terrific moment, and it points to a quantum leap Pardlo’s work might take: dialogue. In “Winter After the Strike,” Pardlo remembers going to work one day with his father, an air traffic controller fired by President Reagan in the 1981 strike: “You’d push the microphone in front of me, nod, and let me give the word. / I called all my stars home, trajectories bent on the weight of my voice.” Every time Pardlo addresses someone besides himself, feeling after lovely feeling comes through. If he gets to moving people around the scenes of his poems, and better yet, lets them speak for themselves, it will be as good as the movies. If he lets his characters sing, he might even outdo the soundtracks.

*

It might help to point out the four or five ways he currently makes his poems reliably dizzy, as well as to mention a few cheap shots he does not take.

Narrative, address. Pardlo always evokes a scene, and there is usually a narrative to piece together, generally addressed either to a sympathetic world, or himself. There are exceptions (see above).

Synecdoche. Pardlo gives and takes the part for the whole again and again. For example, in the (eventually) heartbreaking mother-elegy, “Vanitas, Mother’s Day,” the family piano’s “the Baldwin,” light doesn’t fall but rather “each / photon ripens.” These switcheroos function as resistors in the circuitry of the poem, every sentence requiring the reader to make some cognitive effort. Sometimes there’s too much resistance: looking at the already too-too-special dust in French air in his Van Gogh ode “Vincent’s Shoes” he sees “the lilted tint lambent / and diffuse.” Sometimes it’s kind of hot: in the teen fantasy “Suburban Passional,” he makes a routine paperboy collection call to a widowed neighbor who “crossed the room in Sergio Valentes.” This is significantly better than if she had walked to the door in blue jeans.

Metonymy. His thesaurus imagination often makes the paths he takes more interesting than they appear. In “Atlantic City Sunday Morning,” he notices cameras inside and out, and comments that “Surveillance here is catholic.” From his perch in security, he lets the power-synonym catholic give iconographic shading to the low-res video, seeing haloes and angels, “bishops of risk” (mating sparrows), “a junkyard of churchbells, a reliquary of Sundays” (a postcard image of the state capital at Trenton).

I’m not the critic to defend Pardlo’s dependence on allusion and art-hero stories, nice as his tender moment at the Cedar between Creeley and Pollock may be. If there really are people who need poems with cameos by Orpheus, I wish them the best.

Even in his off-moments, though, Pardlo never lets his poems go as mere words. The experience is always satisfyingly complete, if limited. The end product of these razzle-dazzling meditations and memories is a beautiful portrait — of the author. In this kind of poetry, you’re in it alone.