Contemporary Poetry – serie

This is a poetry of excursions: into maps of lost territories, into the thoughts of a man with no legs, into the life of a town marked by disasters.Patrick Lawler moves into the slender lines of shattered glass, the spaces between lyric and narrative, between metamorphosis and mutation. From the artful surface of a Russian novel, rich with symbolism and white bears, to a survivor's unwillingness to immerse himself in life or leave it, the poems in A Drowning Man Is Never Tall Enough hunger for a language beyond the solid, for the fragmentation that makes a scene complete.

Focusing with equal energy at the imposing sky and at our own home planet, Albert Goldbarth moves from hosannah-choiring angels to a single peach pit glistening on the tongue of Madame Renoir, from the sweep of the earth's ecocycles to the particles of quantum physics.In these poems surgeons, lovers, astronauts, psychiatrists, and priests embark on the same far journey, traveling into the universe of what it means to be human, exploring "how the world works." Here, the ancient Egyptian afterlife and the atrocities of the 10 o'clock news, the realm of guacamole chip dip and the life of Rembrandt mix toward one cohesive vision.

Driven by an endless matrix of poetic forms, the poems of Assembling the Shepherd create a world where allusions to Plato and the Dead Sea scrolls intermingle with car culture and terrorism, where modern skylines are framed within the history of alchemy and architecture. Tessa Rumsey uses words in ways that defy summary and synonym in poetry that challenges the boundaries of common dualities—city and desert, heaven and earth, waking and dreaming, violence and harmony, destruction and regeneration, recollecting and forecasting. She attempts to move beyond these natural contrasts in her poetry, and beyond point of view to create a collection that offers an elemental glimpse of the fragmented yet interconnected world we live in.Throughout the book, familiar themes are seen again and again, undergoing subtle metamorphosis: the seasonal solstice, the sundial, the planets, the Sphinx—as Rumsey invites us beneath the surface of her words.

In They Are Sleeping, Joanna Klink tests the limits of solitude, setting her poems in places where our grip on “self” is loosened and blurred—caves, coastlines, rooms in cities. As her poems lead us through these sometimes beautiful, sometimes appalling internal landscapes, characters like the Hanged Man and the Lady of Situations reappear, often locked in misunderstanding but compelling us toward a more fragile and expansive sense of self.

Joshua McKinney's debut collection of poetry, Saunter, shows immense devotion to and passion for language in all its aspects. He intensely attends to words and delights in the play of accidental connections and complications. Such amusement and playfulness with oppositions is evidenced in lines like: "an opening / a cello scales / some stairs. Risen, / a thought falls." McKinney's awareness of the complex resonance of literary history and current issues of language comes through in his dedication to making the appearance of language, not just its sound or its relative meaning, an integral aspect of his poems. Meanwhile, the subject matter is often surprisingly mythic and mysterious, championing absolute freedom and wildness. His intricate verse is sincere in its observations while turning inward on itself, sauntering in designed indirection.

By Reason of Breakings, Andrew Zawacki's first book of poetry, overwhelms and silences by virtue of its extremely austere beauty. In highly wrought lyrics, prose poems, fragments of apocrypha, and splintered efforts at song, this volume is forceful and haunted by doubt. Each intimate and restrained line is a glimpse at a wisdom that defies paraphrase, each image carefully chosen and constructed. Zawacki's language summons and invites and is almost menacing in its delicate intensity: "Weight is the syntax of filling empty spaces: scalpels and expired tissue fall, but fire rises to fever and sere." While pursuing an explanation for the disappearance of God and for the denouement of a love affair, and exploring the failure of language to compensate or console, these poems maintain their sublime power and elegance.

This innovative new collection of poems by Cal Bedient is Nabokovian in its artifice, its fluency, and its scope—from Kant to Jaqueline Du Pres's Elgar, from Mother Goose to the Upanishads, from poems after the paintings of Corot, Monet, Matisse, and Klee to extended inquiries into the complexities of sexual and other relationships. The poems take up the task of asking what joy is available in the dark and terrifying waves of disease, broken love, and death. The persona voicings are varied, odd, and memorable; and the poems vary widely in their feel, their rhythm, their typology. Everywhere the language is outrageously wet and vivid—sliced orange language. Though the poems often take the form of couplets, quatrains, or some other repeatable structure, the results are daringly unexpected, irrational, compelling, astonishingly beautiful, and moving.

A philosophical, tough, and often funny inquiry into twenty-first-century selfhood, Liz Waldner's new collection of poems takes shape in the shadow of Dante's "dark wood." Dark Would (the missing person) is quirky. It's audaciously American, out of the Dickinson house. Waldner uses short, quick syntactical units that swerve rather than build up an architecture of ideas through sequential juxtaposition. She also has, like Dickinson, a canny, carnal, specifying diction. Her poems are sonorous, sly, and sexy. They are political in their address of gender through reference to pop songs, poems, and analyses of personal experiences. The resulting wry permutations of will and desire alternately leaf and hew an American "dark wood." The pages and paths turn to and through the kinds of lostness and foundness to which rootlessness gives rise.

The Blaze of the Poui unfolds a world as lush and rank as a rain forest, as alluring and lethal as a sea anemone. Mark McMorris writes of the Americas, the Caribbean, and other sites of conquest and colonization, mingling the personal and political, the present and past on pages filled with the language of parting, remembering, promise, and loss.

The world in What Animal is filled with uncontainable data, a rush of experiences tumbling one after the other, experiences whose logic is only that they have happened, or cannot be determined as having happened or not. Images—often spliced together in rapid succession, each with a distinct complex of emotional and associative content—operate in "rhymes" of shape, sound, capacity for motion, texture, and number. Image patterns, sound patterns, syntactical shifts, and physical spaces recur in different forms and combinations, as if, could we only comprehend, the patterns would add up to something of galactic, even infinite, dimension.

As a hummingbird beats its wings so that it might be still to feed on a flower the poet concludes, “The equation keeps balancing out, and / I’m drawn to how it does not settle.” Aware of the difficulty of loving the world while feeding upon it, the poems of Dwelling Song hope vision is levity as they press language to make sight and song. This writing is a form of mimicry yet an act of dangerous flight. Whether from the voice of a hunter, shepherd, farmer, or bugle-blowing boy on a city street, the song recognizes that moving forward necessitates turning one’s back.

In Jennifer K. Dick's first book, Fluorescence, very real places—Paris, Massachusetts, Colorado, Iowa, Morocco—mix into the imagined, into Breughelian villages where there's "a persimmon in the corner knitting." These places are inhabited by varied but always very real bodies, stretching outward from their own edges and encountering, or engendering, a certain luminescence in the process. What happens when we exceed ourselves? When fragments of dream are lifted to the surface and through to something beyond? Clues, keys, indications—all that once seemed certain slips off into code. These poems use language to crack it.

“What desire doesn’t seem as of the distance across a sea?” asks the voice in Kerri Webster’s debut collection of poetry, even as the poems attempt the transformation of that liminal space wherein word meets sense, loneliness meets solitude, and surface meets interior. Here, “the surface is our signature,” and the image of stain presents a way for that surface to reflect that which it conceals. In this space, human intimacy encounters the transience and frailty of language, and through these encounters we discover that grace lies in “believing always in imprint.”

Grounded in deep and thoughtful awareness, this complex collection of poems combines history, sexuality, pop culture, and political experience with edgy, wry, often absurd humor and an underlying penchant for the macabre. Rachel Loden employs both strict and innovative forms in poetry that explores the post-Cold War unease that follows a century of harrowing conflicts. These contradictory elements flower in poems drawn from the ethereal world of pop myths and fairy tales that simultaneously unfold a reality full of absence and mystery. Speaking as intimately of the fall of the Soviet Union as they do of the cinematic crimes and misdemeanors of Woody Allen or the redemptive passion of Little Richard, their tone ranges from the furious to the elegiac, with a comic edge that borrows as much from the gallows as it does from the Borscht Belt. As rich in rhyme, music, and literary allusion as it is in multifaceted meaning, Hotel Imperium presents a surprising blend of sophistication, playfulness, and haunting truths.

These are poems of the present, of commercials and human interest stories, of the drive-in windows that make banks and bedrooms of our cars. These poems trace the faint erasures of time and human relationships-following runners as they pause by the Ticonderoga ferry and Lake Champlain, riding with tourists across a river to an old fort, the distant sounds of a historic slaughter obscured by the misfiring pistons of an inboard motor and by the unforgiving surf.Describing the world he has seen and loved as well as how that world sometimes threatens itself, Gary Margolis speaks with caring humor and seriousness of the brokenness and beauty of America's present.

Gary Margolis's first book of poems is accomplished in its craftsmanship. For many years he has been publishing in magazines and, in this initial gathering of his work, he presents a sustained, mature poetic voice. This is a collection of his best poems and a carefully considered whole, a book that is consistently lyrical and moving.

The Hive, Susan Stewart’s second collection of poetry, brings together new work into three sections that telescope out from private speech to the public and more deeply historical language of the witness. Recurring poems explore the possibilities of language as ceremony while others are rewritings of romanticism and its places. Of Susan Stewart’s first collection, Yellow Stars and Ice, James Cory wrote in the Philadelphia Inquirer that it is “a reading experience to exult in,” and Library Journal stated that “there is magic as well as finesse in this beautiful collection.”

Sweeping across the grave of an ancient empire, settling in among the manikins of Madison Avenue, singing for salvation from an earthly fire, Casey Finch's poems wrestle with the political, personal, and religious questions of our age.Arranged in three parts, Harming Others moves from a mock heroic voice in "The Empire Poems" to a more intimate voice in "The Damaged Poems," one that speaks to friends on their birthdays, wedding days, ordinary days. The book culminates in "The Forbidden Poems"--a retelling of the stories of the Old and New Testaments, a reshaping of religion and history in the present. The burden of human sin, like the weight of human history, is described in "Sin"--Like the blue, unreasonable sheets of ice / that spread out, strong and beautiful, / along the spines of the groaning rivers, / for years our sins covered us / and the parents of us: so cold / if you breathed on them they grew / still colder. For years our limbs clacked / with the weight of them. Our shoulder / blades and the noisy, matted locks / of our hair shook with the sound / of them. For years they hung from our / bones or piled up like heaps of blood. . . .

This powerful collection of poems from Laura Mullen is the edgy, unashamedly experimental, and formally inventive book of a poet who has found her way to her own voice or style—or rather voices and styles, for there are several. The poems of After I Was Dead develop harmonically rather than melodically: they leap from one register, one voice, one tone to another in deft juxtapositions that carry narrative only incidentally, destabilizing traditional notions of development. These poems are honed by a fine intelligence into elegant, sometimes funny art, as in “Autumn”: “Her hair, brown. / Her specialty, damage. / Her specialty, becoming / Something else. Her hair, falling / Leaves, leaf rot, and then soil.” Through her rediscovery of the freedom Emily Dickinson located in being “dead” (in writing from over the border of an already recognized erasure), Mullen increases the territory of the contemporary poem.

Michael Heffernan's is a unique, controlled, yet oblique and interesting poetic voice, full of intelligence and marvelous self-awareness. This book is a sustained and professional performance, practiced any yet full of delightful chances.

Using nature and history as her raw materials, Phillis Levin crafts a world alive with ideas. In striking experiments with form, rhyme, and meter, she examines the condition of our species. Levin is a voyager in these poems, cataloging the earthly spectacle, tempering her lines with an irony that strikes an immediate blow at the heart of things. By turns rhaposidist and rhetorician, visionary and witness, she transforms the cycle of love and death into a majestic music:Machines have their own seasons, revolvingAround us, though nature is not their fulcrum.They too move beyond repair to neglect,But cannot die like a diving falconOr repeat, in the end, names that inflectAs the sum of one’s parts stops working.Unconverted by death, they know nothing Of the glory of noise and the daily Trade of the ugly and the beautifulWe have listened to, in stories of manyFor whom engines were passions, and the feelOf life the sense of a great sound building.In language that fuses the discursive and the lyrical, the contemplative and the dramatic, Phillis Levin renews metaphysical inquiry. Temples and Fields becomes finally a study of joy and terror—“the meticulous counting down / Of beginning leaf and scattered petal”—and of the primordial link between the human and the divine.

All of the medical, technological, and psychological advances of the twentieth century challenge “mere mortals” in Terese Svoboda’s third book of poetry. In “Faust,” a mini-epic in five acts, the eponymous character of literary legend appears in the form of a woman, who redefines what being mortal means in light of the politics of the Third World, and gender. In contrast “Ptolemy’s Rules for High School Reunions” explores what happens when you do without a pact with the devil. The gods—Greek and otherwise—also make appearances as a TV announcer in “Philomela,” in the basement with the plumber in “The Smell of Burning Pennies,” and in the dyslexic confusion between “Dog/God.” But it is not only the divine that charges the poems in Mere Mortals—sex also suffuses and reinvents key relationships. Readers of such wittily probing poems as “The Root of Father is Fat” and “Brassiere: Prison or Showcase?” will know why Philip Levine has described Svoboda as “one light-year from being the polite, loverly, workshop poet. Mere Mortals poems first appeared in such magazines as the New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, Paris Review, and the American Poetry Review.

These are poems of family, of romantic hope and disappointment, of parenthood, and of grief that move from a childhood in Nebraska in which a father strides into a ripe wheat field; to the parks and parking lots of New York City, the interchangeable landscapes of suburban America, and the more sensual environment of secluded water; to little traveled parts of Africa and the Pacific where our customs and passions are refracted into shapes that are sometimes beautiful, sometimes grotesque.Terese Svoboda writes of a world in which the reassuring simplicity remembered from childhood is difficult to recover. Outside of this vision of the past, all present life seems an aberration—an existence where violence can supplant love, families break apart, a child dies.All Aberration received a starred review in Publishers Weekly, a lead in Contemporary Poetry 1986 and a Notable Book nomination by the American Library Association. It was written during stays at Yaddo, MacDowell and Ossabaw, and received the benefit of a Creative Artists Public Service grant in 1982. Its poems first appeared in such magazines as Harper’s, The Nation, Paris Review, and Ploughshares.

Andy Robbins concludes, in "Au bout de l’anglais," that "Art and life are not the same. Never." He challenges the nature of both with this volume of highly personal, sensual, searching poetry that treats life as a work in progress, with love, in all its aspects, as its driving force. Creating poems as technically skilled as they are emotionally powerful, Robbins uses a variety of formal and idiomatic dictions. Though the individual works are as unique in subject as in structure, the book is unified by a discomfort with emotional and intellectual stagnancy, with ancient mythology, religious doctrines, and popular culture. The book radiates the immediate energy of mind in action, question, and reflection, challenging the very thought of writer and reader.

In Sydney Lea’s poems, purest joy and woe flash amid the mundane, and beauty knows the full range of nature—from the plumed tension of a newborn child twisting away from the ready breast to bright birds lying dead on the winter lawn. Many of these poems are backward looking, savoring the gentle pause at summer’s end, recalling with fledgling hope former victories of spring, seeking in the woeful host of memory something that has held its charge.

Eschewing irony for direct statement, the poems in Tod Marshall's first collection imagistically, musically, and passionately articulate a faith in human transcendence. From the mud of our formation ("Choir") to the dust of our dying ("After Kandinsky"), Marshall's poems lyrically obsess over how the broken and violated can envision and speak a heaven of which we know.Three long poems that shape the book are formative in this process. From the structured order of Bach's Goldberg Variations looming behind the opening poem, "Eclipse," to the clash of pagan beauty and traditional religiosity in "Botticelli," to the Modernist meditation on form in "After Kandinsky," the poems return again and again to the idea of anagogical presence and how it can be best rendered in art to inspire a celebratory ethos of living. Are the violent and shocking events those that best slap us awake? Or are the gentle, lyrical moments the times when we are most keenly aware of the song that is Being? In "After Kandinsky," Marshall writes, "like syntax / a poem that fixes the body / to a specific place / of points and lines and planes / and yet moves to celestial music / a poem that tests / on fifteenth century truth / 'Whoever loves much does much' / a poem that glistens with an unmatched insistence / a poem that arrives on time / and demands everyone / nail it to the wall."Here is a declaration that one could nail manifesto-like to the wall as a pronouncement of the need to see, to hear, and to speak of divinity in the world.