Philip Levine: BREATH

When I reviewed Philip Levine’s The Mercy in the first issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review back in the fall of 1999, I concluded my comments with a quote from one of the poems, “The Unknowable,” a tribute to jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins. I suggested some of the lines, including the closing ones, could prove just as fitting for a description of Levine: “a man who stared for years / into the breathy, unknowable voice / of silence and captured the music.” Therefore, when I noticed the title of Levine’s next collection and read the book’s epigraph (“Some days I catch a rhythm, almost a song / in my own breath”) drawn from the first lines of its final poem, “Call It Music,” a similar tribute to Charlie “Bird” Parker, I smiled.

My smile showed not only from a recognition of the repetition in images that bridges the two volumes, but also from a sense of fulfillment, a feeling that Levine, too, was acknowledging some greater degree of identification with the musicians he admires so much, those figures of jazz such as Bird, with his “breath of genius / which now I hear soaring above my own.” Like those bebop musicians—including Bud Powell or Thelonious Monk—Levine lauds in his deceptively plain-spoken yet lyrical lines, the poet has developed a distinctive sound over the past few decades that preserves well the mood and atmosphere of particular times or places now lost. As well, the poet’s characters, many long dead, appear as presences kept alive a little bit longer by lingering elegiac lyrics, each phrase sounding like a breath of expression blown into a wind instrument or notes from some old piano riff held forever on tape from a recording session more than half a century ago.

In the last two decades readers may have detected a mellowing voice in many of Philip Levine’s poems, which has resulted in a strengthening rather than a weakening of the poetry. The language one finds in his recent collections appears more open to a greater range of sentiments and to possibilities of extending forth moments holding tender emotions without slipping into sentimentality. In Alice Quinn’s conversation with Levine and Galway Kinnell that appeared in The New Yorker last October, Levine acknowledged his awareness of a shift within his work after once hearing Kinnell compliment “tenderness” in poetry: “I thought, he’s right. Why the hell isn’t that in my poetry? It changed the way I looked at the past.”

That effort to include a tender look at the world has been especially evident in Levine’s last two books—his pair of volumes published since winning the National Book Award in 1991 for What Work Is and the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for The Simple Truth; although, the poet’s softer voice was already speaking in much of those award-winning collections as well. Levine seems to be emphasizing less anger and resentment in these recent works, as he displays even greater affection for those individuals from his past who populate his poems. In his New Yorker discussion with Quinn and Kinnell, Levine remarked upon a wish to include in his writing many individuals he’d known over the years, “people who didn’t appear in poetry,” and whose lives touched his own: “I thought, God, what an opportunity I’ve been given here, to try to get these people into some poems. And then, lo and behold, they appear in The New Yorker.

Perhaps no other contemporary poet has exhibited as large a cast of characters in his or her poetry as Philip Levine has in his heartfelt elegiac lyrics concerning personal relations, as well as in the eloquent emotional reflections on historical figures or cultural icons whose influence may have helped mold Levine’s own heart and certainly aided in shaping his art. In his New Yorker dialogue, Levine reveals his new thinking: “I began to focus on the people whom I worked with and had great affection for, people who transformed my vision of the human with their grace and their courage and their independence.”

Indeed, Levine’s technique of honoring others by keeping them alive in his lines, preserving memories one by one in his poetry, also serves to create for readers a distinct and detailed cumulative portrait of the poet’s own persona. Here, too, Levine has benefited recently from an increased scope of emotions in his poetry due to his even more compassionate voice. One is won over by the depth of feelings, especially the vulnerability and an awareness of the inherent transience in life, held by the speaker in “The West Wind” who can “hear / the past years calling / in the pale voices / of the air,” or who observes one tree that “harbors a few leaves / from last fall, black, curled, / a silent chorus / for all those we’ve left / behind.” When the persona pronounces, “at my back I feel / a new wind come on, / chilling, relentless, / with all the power of loss, the meaning / unmistakable,” he invokes haunting thoughts of mortality and he invites readers to consider their own state of impermanence.

In “Moradian,” a piece which tries to bring to life a high school friend killed in World War II, Levine laments that only he remains to maintain the memory: “He can’t just be me, / smaller now than I, his damp hands empty, / his breath my breath, his silence also mine / in the face of our life, he just can’t be.” Throughout this collection, Levine assumes an obligation to those who might be forgotten without his words instilling fresh breath into their personae. One way by which he proceeds with his duty is to attempt a cessation of time within the lines of his poems. Repeatedly, Levine cites specific years during which the narrated events occur: readers are reminded it is “1928,” “1933,” “1938,” etc. Each poem wants time halted, perhaps like the “fenced truck yard / behind my father’s grease shop where all time stopped” (“1/1/2000”). Levine perceptively mentions in “The Lesson”: “Sixty-four years ago, / and each morning is frozen in memory, / each a lesson in what was to come.”

The book contains two longer sets of poetry, “Dust” and “Naming,” similar to extended pieces familiar to readers of Levine’s past volumes. Each series is reinvigorated by its pattern of narrative. In “Dust” Levine includes five numbered sections incorporating dust as a central metaphor, complete with its traditional implication of death and the associations with circumstances of lost lives in that past era known by the “Dust Bowl.” In one section Levine even reports that he lives “across from a funeral parlor,” and the series ends with the poet joining his wife to toast their New Year with wine, an act “as good as any / to stall our time from whirling into dust.”

“Naming,” which takes up an entire part of Breath, has twenty-five 15-line pieces, each with an octet and a septet. The uniformity of the poems contributes to the impression of a litany being presented in this sequence as, one after another, the works capture memories of moments or men and women the poet had once known so they are no longer forgotten: “Over and over we live / that perfect winter of ’33,” Levine writes in one section. In another he wonders: “Who are these people in our lives / talking in voices that were never theirs?” At one point, the speaker concedes a sense of frustration with his efforts: “I say your names, numberless, / into the wind, and it’s not enough.” In its entirety, "Naming" supplies a stunning example of Levine's poetic skill.

Sometimes when reading Philip Levine’s poetry, I feel like I might become lulled by the reluctant eloquence hidden within such seemingly blunt and unpretentious poetry delivered in a straightforward manner some may mistake as ordinary or muted. Also, I frequently forget how much of Levine’s poetry is about suggesting the self as reflected through meditations on the lives of others. As one of Philip Levine’s former students and also an elegiac poet, Larry Levis, once explained, elegy is “self-reflexive,” revealing the mind and nature of the poet as much as the character of the subject in the poem. Thus, in Breath Philip Levine continues to give readers a glimpse into his thoughts on life by reviving the dead, and he provides significant lessons on living, even when he appears to confront more openly his own mortality. As he ominously describes in the final lines of the book after so much naming as a way of reclaiming, what lies ahead now are “the low gray clouds / blowing relentlessly in from that nameless ocean, / the calm and endless one I’ve still to cross.”

Levine, Philip. Breath. Knopf, 2004.

Kathrine Varnes: THE PARAGON

Unlike a number of first books of poetry, Katherine Varnes’s The Paragon does not lend toward simple categorization or seem easily predictable in its presentation. Although Varnes appears most comfortable when writing in some variation of a traditional form, particularly the sonnet, her voice also projects well in free verse, even when the format becomes somewhat experimental, as in “The Great Refusal,” a series of poems described by the poet as being “in conversation with Herbert Marcuse’s Essays on Liberation,” interspersing quoted phrases from Marcuse’s writing with Varnes’s own innovative lines. In one example, the poet writes: “In my vague because repressed memories of our bed / Technique would then tend to become art / apart from me.”

Moreover, the tone in Varnes’s poetry may shift quickly from quirky and filled with wit to meditative and heartbreaking. For instance, in “Lakota Coffee House” Varnes offers the restrained portrait of a lonely woman whose “tremor in her fingers spells betrayal, / the way she cups the mug’s wide mouth for warmth.” This piece follows a marvelously mischievous poem, “On Modesty,” containing a playfully unrestrained persona: “The more she said fuck / the more I said Heavens to Betsy, having no / idea what that meant . . ..”

On the other hand, despite the variations in presentation and tone, there appears to be a consistency of theme throughout The Paragon—one that examines love and marriage, loss and betrayal. Such a unifying focus serves well to knit together the three sections of the book, each quite different from the other two in its physical presence on the page. From the opening stanza of the book’s initial poem, “Like It Is,” Varnes establishes an attitude toward love, commitment, and deception: “Here is the fool / who said I do.” By the poem’s closing line, its speaker reveals an evident weakness: “Our love was ever indigent.” In this first piece, Varnes also displays her clever ability to create fresh lines within the formal use of rhyme by pairing “heliotrope” with “grope,” “granule” with “cruel,” “elegant” with “indigent,” and the most surprising “antique” with “sweet geek.”

In addition to her mixture of traditional formal presentation with often-colloquial language and contemporary situations or props, Varnes shrewdly uses mythical allusions in innovative ways, whether it be “The Apprentice Siren” who is seen singing in “smoky bars” and, after “whistled catcalls and slurred compliments,” lugging her equipment to the trunk of her car, or in “Leda and the Poet,” a sonnet partially about writing a sonnet, in which “he pulls two quatrains straight from the air— / his sestet unfurls from the small of her back, her power.” Even in “When I Loved Milton,” the poet’s lighter side is shown: “So I read Cleanth Brooks who told me / about knowledge, about Eve, silly / silly Eve.”

Nevertheless, the centerpiece of this collection consists of an extended crown of forty-two sonnets (plus a coda) titled “His Next Ex-Wife.” Through an astute blend of informal language, narrative movement, and excerpted dialogue arranged within the formal sonnet sequence, Varnes presents a scenario in which an ex-wife engages in a telephone conversation with her former husband’s current wife who, as the title suggests, is soon to be his next ex-wife, since her husband, Paul, has already moved out of their house. During the phone dialogue both women compare notes, recognizing similarities in Paul’s behavior toward them and gradually beginning to empathize with one another, as the plural pronoun indicates when one of them wonders: “How could we marry this guy?” By the final lines of the crown the new wife even comments: “Did you know that sometimes people thought I was you?”

The growing connection between the two women as they start to identify with one another’s situation, mirroring each other’s emotional reactions, can be discerned in the crown’s tactical repetitive pattern of restating the last line of one sonnet in the first line of the following piece. Indeed, Varnes handles well the difficult task of setting up lines that could be doubled in such a way as to be effective first and last lines while still appearing fresh or different in each use, and she manages to do so without taking too many liberties, though selecting imaginative substitutions when necessary. For instance, one such inventive stretch occurs when a sonnet’s closing line reads: “'I paid for that!' Talk about billets-doux.” Yet, in the following poem’s first line the language undergoes transition: “'I paid for that talk.' As for bills come due . . ..” By the time the sonnet sequence nears its end, the first wife becomes an understanding figure who extends helping words of advice to her successor: “Her voice is soft, so I tell Nancy / recovery takes a while.“

Often in this collection characters appear to be in a process of recovery or transition, and Varnes seems to supply in her poetry opportunities for them to express their progression through confusion to a state of personal recognition or awareness and self-discovery. She also provides many instances of poetic ambiguities that contribute to a sense of mystery—even in apparently innocent moments, as in “One Devil,” a poem about a childhood backyard experience that is replete with dark sexual connotations—or to a more humorous response from readers, as in the initial lines of “Swearing”: “Do you swear to take this man? / He asked and I said yes, I can— / I do.”

The title of the book implies a perfect example or an ideal, and in “His Next Ex-Wife” the speaker avows: “There’s nothing worse than being an ideal.” She later reveals: “It took sacrifice to make a perfect fit.” Finally, she asks: “Must vanity insist on love’s perfection . . .?” However, the speaker of “On Modesty” recognizes the false choice of perfection, as she reveals: “I paragoned / by day. By night, the Kmart / parking lot’s dark corner: red hatchback carpet and / the hands of Angelo.”

The biographical note for the book cover artist—Ilya Zomb, whose Pleasure of Twisting seems precisely right for this collection—proposes that in his art “a humorous sense of irony underscores his slightly askew symbolism.” One might make the same claim for Kathrine Varnes’s poetic lines, which sometimes seem contrary to readers’ expectations, resulting in poems one can enjoy for the surprisingly risky twists they take and one can appreciate for the astonishing discoveries they make of what may or may not exist, as in the book’s concluding image where the speaker tears through silk scarves in a drawer to find a ring box and “look inside.” With the many examples of worthy poetry in The Paragon, Kathrine Varnes gives readers numerous reasons to look inside this volume.

Varnes, Kathrine. The Paragon. WordTech Editions, 2005.

Daniel Tobin: THE NARROWS

Few new books of poetry appear as ambitiously constructed and as admirably attuned to an era or an atmosphere as Daniel Tobin’s The Narrows. Indeed, despite a primary focus on tales concerning his own relatives, the scope of Tobin’s poetry is anything but “narrow.” Reading this collection of poems about his family’s emigration from Ireland and consequent generational developments in Brooklyn, I sometimes feel like I’ve come across personal correspondence hidden in a kin’s hope chest or an unusually poetic set of memoirs, perhaps similar in content to those prose accounts brought forth by the McCourt brothers. Tobin’s images of individuals in domestic settings are like photos we see when we “leaf through albums . . . captive fragments, / poses struck for the camera, each one / vivid as a rainbow, its colors shading / into the next” (“The Rainbow Café”).

Occasionally even some slender collections of poems seem to me padded with lesser poetry or unnecessary pieces; however, The Narrows comes stuffed with so much wonderful work in its nearly 180 pages spread among a proem and twelve sections that one initially almost wishes it had been split into two or even three books, allowing for more attention to the quality and less dilution by the quantity. Nevertheless, in the end, the cumulative effect of the various series of poems and of the interwoven stories of family members’ lives threaded throughout the collection outweighs the greater emphasis individual poems might receive and the more manageable organization one might witness if some works had been trimmed or the bulk of this book had been divided into slimmer volumes.

Daniel Tobin is a poet of poignant personal portraits and an author to whom identifiable locations matter, particularly those places from his past so closely linked to intimate experiences. Within The Narrows Tobin introduces readers to an interesting cast of characters—mother, father, brother, uncles, aunts, grandparents, neighbors—and brilliant scenes, at home in New York or overseas in ancestral Ireland, he believes most noteworthy in their lives, as well as in his own. In fact, about three-dozen poems name places in their titles, from a specific address in Brooklyn (“502 Schenck Avenue”) to the site of his brother’s Buddhist monastery (“Thinking of Meade Mountain”) and across the ocean to locales in Ireland seen during Tobin’s “reverse journey” to the land of his ancestors (“Inishboffin Suite”).

Born and raised at the same time and in the same neighborhoods of Brooklyn, and sharing similar family histories, I concede that perhaps I more easily identify with the characters and events chronicled by Tobin in The Narrows. At times, I feel I am reading passages concerning my own experiences or relations. Nevertheless, I think it would be difficult for any reader not to be attracted to Tobin’s attentive rendering of settings or to miss the emotional impact in the assiduously drawn personalities within his poetry. Many of the poems in The Narrows are so powerful one wonders how they could go unnoticed by lovers of poetry, and the most effective sections of the book serve as excellent poetic sequences that only increase the impressive merit of the entire collection.

The title of this collection refers to the strait that passes by Tobin’s childhood home in Brooklyn and to the Verrazano Narrows Bridge built during Tobin’s boyhood days to span that waterway, rising into the skies outside his window like a colossal figure: “one day we saw the legs barely risen, / two sheer columns of iron and steel: / the tensile thighs of a man being built.” Although the body never fully takes shape (“where was the rest of him, broad torso and head?”), the physical existence of the bridge soon looms over the nearby shore and becomes a metaphorical, if not mythical, presence in Tobin’s poetry, just as it must have been in the lives and imaginations of those inhabiting homes within visual distance of the bridge: “It was we who gave the image to the air” (“Bridge View”).

Continually, Tobin seems to present themes relating to the bridging of a gap, whether it be the physical and emotional distance between himself and his father that had grown over years—“I feel the line going slack / between us” (“Twentieth Century Limited”)—or the separation that had developed into an absence between his American family and their Irish relatives: “This was my idea, to arrange her return / to where she’d never been, or had been only / in the myth she made of her life” (“My Mother at the House of Her Father’s Fathers”). Likewise, Tobin reaches out to his brother who has converted to Buddhism, and he repeatedly seeks to reconcile the boy he once was to the poet he has become: “I bring my trace home, even now / splicing the narrative together, sounding it out, / pasts made present already the past” (“The Narrows”). In the title poem Tobin also suggests part of the definition of being an American is a reconciliation with the past and an understanding of one’s self amid differing identities, both historical and contemporary: “Is that what it means to be an American, / discovering yourself in the distance?”

Elsewhere, in “A Coat” Tobin speaks of a gift given by a friend, an old coat that had once been worn by the friend's grandfather, a stowaway who’d escaped oppression in the Old World and settled to difficult labor while raising a family in a lower Manhattan tenement, then returned alone to his homeland, living out his life as a legendary recluse: “in the myths we make our lives, // the names lift out of their places, threads / woven into another fabric, like the words.” Near the conclusion of this poem Tobin extends the metaphor: “I’m wearing America like your coat, / the body outsized and rumpled, marred by stains.” It is a gift one would like to do without, perhaps, but just cannot: "And so you come / to find it beautiful, smoothing your hand / along its length, the frayed stitches, the pattern of small bones.”

Ultimately, despite my previous hypothetical division of the book into separate collections and notwithstanding Tobin’s forming the volume into units with poems carrying distinct titles, one would be wise simply to read the whole of The Narrows as a single long poem with ties to Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” or Hart Crane’s “The Bridge.” Although each of the sections of this book has an individual identity and unique content or characteristics, including a nicely written sonnet sequence, the independence of each piece or of the several series of poems does not diminish a unified approach to reading the poetry from the proem through to the final lines in the book, where the speaker, again offering a metaphor connecting the past with the present as well as the future, is seen driving back with his pregnant wife “over the Narrows / into our own lives” (“Outerbridge Crossing”). Below them, waters continue to flow, though reflecting the lighter heavens with which they now are connected in imagery: “a current deeper than history, / the sky bodied in its waters, bright and ongoing.” Indeed, Tobin includes a section of notes at the end of his book where he refers to The Narrows as one long work that “comprises a mural in verse in which individual poems link together recursively to form a single dramatic arc.”

The intricate linking of people and places occurs everywhere in this volume; however, the opening poem from a stellar sequence, “Pearl Court,” hints at the origins of Tobin's poetic ear. In "The House," which displays a variety of neighbors remembered from the building where his family lived in a four-room apartment during his childhood, Tobin recalls the night of a city blackout when everybody climbed to the roof for a view through “the blackness, stars visible / above our cramped antennas.” In the silence and dark that brought them all together, “they listened to ships sounding / on the Narrows like voices through a wall— / the muffled promise of lives beyond our own.” In this collection of poems, Tobin seems still to be attentive to voices, some shadowed by death, listening through the walls of time that separated generations from one another and created distance between individuals. With The Narrows, Daniel Tobin has successfully recorded significant sounds and surroundings, preserving vivid pictures for readers to witness, creating an album of captive fragments depicting the lives behind those voices from the past he has magnificently brought forth for everyone to hear.

Tobin, Daniel. The Narrows. Four Way Books, 2005.

Dorianne Laux: FACTS ABOUT THE MOON

Occasionally, students will ask me where the “poetry” can be found in contemporary free verse poems that to them appear merely first-person prose monologues fractured on the page. In reply, I pull out a copy of Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish.” I ask them to read just the opening and closing lines as if they were a single statement: “I caught a tremendous fish . . . And I let the fish go.” That alone may be prose, I will concede, but everything in the nearly seventy-five lines between defines poetry—the precise imagery, the description that involves all five senses, the similes and metaphors, the personification, the rhythm of the lines, the selected line breaks, the smooth movement proceeding through the poem, the speaker’s tone, the word choice and connotations, the alliteration and incidents of internal rhyme, the uncertainty and sense of suspense, etc.

At one point while reading Dorianne Laux’s Facts About the Moon I was reminded of that exercise I try with my students. Midway through the collection, Laux presents “Her First,” a poem that includes the following opening and closing lines: “Who remembers when she told me”; “I remember now.” Between those two plain statements, the first almost a question to which the second seemingly responds, Laux provides more than forty lines of fine poetry in which the speaker recalls a narrative about a new nurse (the speaker’s mother) and her first experience with a dying patient. As in the natural process of memory and imagination, the event unfolds through a fluid sequence of associations linked with images. In an extended metaphor, the poet focuses closely on the eye contact maintained during the incident. About ten times in the course of the commentary, the poet refers to the ways the pair see one another, particularly how the mother “never looked away” and held “a direct gaze” even “as she watched over / the last minutes of his anonymous life,” the patient’s “death fluttering down / under the soft black wings of his lashes.” As the conceit continues, despite “the institutional gray walls,” the speaker seems pleased “the last color / he would see” with his “rust-colored eyes” was “the sea-blue corona / of her eyes, irises spiked with amber.” For the duration of this piece, the flow of the poem and the depth of its poetic effects are as unmistakable as those catalogued with Bishop’s “The Fish.”

Likewise, throughout most of the poems in this collection, Dorianne Laux’s deceptively subtle poetic voice carries readers from beginning images to final lines with a satisfying language that interestingly combines intimate personal reflection and a remarkable narrative account of oftentimes ordinary activities or everyday episodes resulting in an extraordinarily gratifying conclusion that provokes further contemplation long after the last word of the poem. In “The Lost” Laux starts by describing a past relationship the speaker had deemed a casual romance. She regards the night she slept with “one of those back-then boys” as nothing but a “transient sweetness.” However, from that phrase through most of the poem, as the pronoun shifts from “he” to “they,” readers are entertained by an inventory of characteristics the speaker adored and cherished in “the sheer variety” of other lovers she has known over the years. Yet, the woman brings an abrupt end to the multiple memories when she reports a surprise phone call she received from the young man’s boss summoning her to the hospital after a work accident, and “the torn stumps of his fingers” on an “unbandaged hand” confront her, she who was “the last to have touched him whole.”

Repeatedly, Laux presents such narrative patterns of personal poetry that reflect the influence of Philip Levine and Sharon Olds, both of whom receive a mention in the content of “Savages,” a wonderful work that describes an insatiable love for poetry in primitive descriptions reminiscent of Mark Strand’s “Eating Poetry.” As with most memorable poems, in Laux’s poetry the path on which readers are led as they journey from the beginning of the work to the last image is as enjoyable and as enlightening as the final lines that provide clever closure to the poem. Usually written as soliloquies in a clear and conversational voice some might suggest contains prose qualities, Laux’s poems invite readers in for a speaker’s intimate glimpse at the world around her. Indeed, the prose-like feel in some of the poems may enhance their properties of authority and veracity since any aura of artifice is diminished. Each poem’s success depends upon the presence of an intelligent and intuitive perspective promoted by the poet’s persona. Dorianne Laux’s speakers continually exhibit more than a bit of wisdom, often combined with witty or inventive language as well as an authentic and assured sense of self.

In “Superglue” the poet engages in an extended meditation on the actual process of childbirth and one’s eventual assumption of a series of lifelong adventures by bonding those topics with an instance in which the speaker accidentally glues together two fingers: “I’d forgotten how fast it happens, the blush of fear / and the feeling of helpless infantile stupidity….” The poet transitions with a slick switch in the center of attention to her own birth: “This is how I began inside / my mother’s belly, before I divided toe from toe….” In short order, by the close of the poem, the persona confides her desire perhaps to complete a cycle of life by approaching her husband, wanting “to climb him, / stuff him inside me and fill that space, poised / on the brink of opening opening opening / as my wrinkled fingers, pale and slippery, / remember themselves, and part.”

Perhaps because of my own many misspent years in Brooklyn pool halls, I’m amused by the portrayal of a young woman who ventures into the masculine surroundings in “Poolhall”: “She leans over the felt, her pelvis / grazing the sheened maple rubbed / to a gloss by the musky oils / of men’s naked forearms.” The female’s sensuality becomes a focus for the men, who are “in love with the way / she sways and sings to the cuts / on the jukebox.” Rather than perceived as an unwanted interloper in this male atmosphere, she is secretly seen by the men as a wanted sexual attraction; though the men “pretend they don’t see her” whenever she arrives, and they distract themselves by “counting toothpicks and quarters,” they’re also “counting their lucky stars.”

With the rare exception of a few poems written with a more distant perspective or less intimate voice that are admirable in their intent, but to me appear not quite as persuasive in their presentation or may even seem slightly forced (such as “Democracy” and “For Matthew Shepard”), Dorianne Laux’s Facts About the Moon delivers consistently pleasing and fulfilling poems readers will find both entertaining and enriching. Most seem like jigsaw puzzles put together by the poet as we watch, each piece fit in place by a perfectly positioned pithy phrase or needed detail until, as occurs in “Puzzle Dust,” the speaker seems to realize “it all, at last, makes sense, a vast / satisfaction fills me.”

As happens in the collection’s title poem, Laux frequently transforms through her vivid imagination an observed act or a noted fact, perhaps that the moon is moving away from Earth “an inch and a half each year,” into a series of intimate associations by the poem’s persona, ushering readers to unexpected areas that may be amusing (“The Idea of Housework”), tragic (“My Brother’s Grave”), elegiac (“The Birthday Party”), or even shocking (“It Must Have Been Summer”). Though one can be confident the result will be rewarding, it is this uncertainty of outcome that creates a deceptively ambiguous tone with surprising mystery and unusual suspense in works with such seemingly ordinary subjects, drawing readers toward Dorianne Laux’s poetry so that they respond as her speaker in the title poem does when she conveys the power of an illuminated moon: “you know when you see it, / you can feel its lunar strength, its brutal pull.” The next time my students ask how the “poetry” can be identified in such works, maybe I’ll reply by quoting those two lines, and I will propose they read Laux’s poems.

Laux, Dorianne. Facts About the Moon. W.W. Norton, 2006.

Dave Smith: LITTLE BOATS, UNSALVAGED

In his recent collection of essays and interviews, Hunting Men: Reflections on a Life in American Poetry (LSU Press, 2006), Dave Smith repeatedly emphasizes the importance of place in poetry. Not only does he recognize the role region has held in his own poetry, but he believes for most poets the location of birth and upbringing, or perhaps an adopted geographical territory one comes to consider home, exerts extraordinary influence over their perspectives and the style of language brought into the work. Smith even declares: “Regional identity is central to poetry’s power. Great poetry cannot be divorced from an intimate, organic link to place.”

Although some may challenge the comprehensive stretch of such a wide-ranging generalization and offer a name or two of significant poets who do not seem to conform to this formula, certainly one also could easily construct a long list of poets who fit perfectly into this profile. What matters most here, however, is that Smith views himself as a writer of place—most often of the South, particularly the tidewater area of Chesapeake Bay, although a couple of Smith’s best books, Goshawk, Antelope and Dream Flights, center on the mountainous West where Smith lived for a brief time. As Smith indicates: “Place may be native landscape or the landscape one’s imagination possesses.”

The opening section of Little Boats, Unsalvaged returns readers of Smith’s poetry to familiar ground since most of the poems look back, sometimes with nostalgia and longing, to the poet’s early experiences growing up in coastal Virginia. As he has done so well in the past, Smith chronicles his boyhood and adolescence, a loss of innocence and maturing to manhood, celebrating the figures that helped shape the young man he once was. However, in these poems the poet seems to exhibit even more wistfulness than in past collections. Smith’s sometimes affectionate glimpses into his past also appear to evoke a sense of yearning or regret that so much time has passed, and during that lapse of decades many of the people or places he loved have changed or are gone, including that young self he barely recognizes in his fading memories: “What year was that? My memory swims, reaches” (“Aunt Pink and Uncle Brownie’s Day”).

In a poignant poem (“Against Blossoms”) about his father, who was killed most likely by a drunk driver in a horrible automobile accident on Mother’s Day while Smith was still in high school, the narrator reports about the father’s death, “oil on the street, open as a rose.” The lines of this poem draw a tender portrait of the father shown growing flowers in a garden, “watering what he won’t see bloom,” and at the funeral Smith is reminded by everyone how much he looks like his father, remarks that cause the teenager to grin, “bright as undying / blossoms climbing what he’d leave, and so would I.”

The second section of Little Boats, Unsalvaged presents a series of poems written about travels overseas. Although the location for the poems is beyond the borders of Smith’s usual terrain, readers might feel a refreshing change of pace with the shift of setting. Seemingly uneasy about being out of place in some of these poems, the speaker sometimes appears to be comforted by comparisons containing allusions to more familiar surroundings or experiences. In “Pre-Alps” a black Mercedes “curves / like a possum in Maryland’s night wood where / my dead uncle took me hunting.” Even the constellations above are seen in relation to back home: “down-spiraling stars vanish as I see them / over Virginia’s marshes. My grandfather / said God seems to call them back” (“Seeking Words”).

Although Smith’s personal poems always appear to engage some of the larger issues confronting all individuals, at times Smith more obviously expands his poetry beyond the autobiographical to include compelling pieces involving social concerns or historical moments of horror. In “Antique German Cycle with Sidecar at Hotel Du Lac” Smith, after admitting his own previous lack of great knowledge about World War II, imagines a scene involving the village’s lovely floral setting a half century ago: “Boxwoods, trimmed, round, / thicken like hair on a Jew’s boy in market stalls; plump / oleander trees, whiter than a German lieutenant’s gloves // drop tender offerings on unmeasurable dark with each / gust of the coming storm.” Earlier in the book, in “Following the Cross” Smith describes a situation when as a boy he witnessed a Klan rally: “Big men, white-sheeted, stood, eyes to the flame ooze, / smoke’s stream starring wood’s crown and tin / roof where a farmer lived.” Both poems exhibit the kind of power readers have found in Smith’s best lyrical narratives over the years.

A third section of this book focuses even more closely on elegiac verse, as Smith presents poems recalling or honoring, to one degree or another, a number of authors, including Bernard Malamud, Edwin Muir, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and William Matthews. Perhaps in these poems—as in the other pieces remembering people or places from his earlier days and reliving a period long gone, occasionally by reviving the younger self as persona—Smith gives an indication of his increased desire to reflect on the passage of time and on impermanence. The book’s touching title poem, drawn from this section, serves the perfect metaphor for mortality, the effects of corrosion caused by time’s handling, and the natural cycles of life.

In 1996 Smith published Fate’s Kite, a collection of brief poems pre-determined in the writing process to be thirteen lines of eleven syllables each. The book, his previous individual collection before Little Boats, Unsalvaged (a group of new poems also appeared in The Wick of Memory, his 2000 book of “selected poems”), represented an admirable attempt at experimentation with his poetry; however, the compressed form appeared to be too confining, restricting Smith’s poetic voice, especially its elevated sense of language and storytelling. In Little Boats, Unsalvaged Dave Smith once again offers readers a robust volume of poetry that shows off the poet’s broad voice with its full and rolling tone. The language is lavish, energetic, and generous. The poet’s emotional subject matter is engaging and accompanied by an often-affecting elegiac tone.

For some, Dave Smith’s use of language may be an acquired taste. His poetry has been criticized for its sometimes-difficult syntax, and the lyricism of his long narratives has been questioned. Smith has acknowledged an interest in a muscular language, perhaps obtained from the two poets who have most influenced his work, Robert Penn Warren and James Dickey. In one of the interviews from Hunting Men, Smith confesses to a taste for thick layering of language in his lines: “Over the years this has tended to excess, it comes out more Anglo-Saxon alliterative and jammed stresses now than it used to.”

However, Smith is at his best when he loads layer on layer through narratives with looping language in longer sentences resembling the exaggerated rhetoric of oratory, allowing for an ambitious and risky narrative voice as appears in “Plowman,” the long work that stands as the sole poem in the final section of this collection and acts as testament to how this poet values “the courage of living,” even as he sees much of life has slipped into the past, become “the less and less that lives.” Smith pays respect to those who have gone before him, and he is aware of the kinds of erosion that occur over time: “And of God, who owns all the hardware and time / that rusts or breaks it.” Fortunately, however, he also continues to display in his poetry why life is worth living, while he keeps an eye on the future and new beginnings (“no hour bests dawn-glow”), which may relay at least a little bit of hope for all to hold no matter where we live under that rising sun.

Smith, Dave. Little Boats, Unsalvaged. LSU Press, 2005.

Rebecca Dunham: THE MINIATURE ROOM

Rebecca Dunham’s The Miniature Room begins appropriately with an epigraph by Gaston Bachelard, known for his philosophical writing, The Poetics of Space: “The miniscule, a narrow gate, opens up an entire world.” A primary focus of Bachelard’s studies was the way humans interact with their domestic environment, especially the manner in which we are affected by our experiences in intimate spaces such as the various rooms in our homes. Likewise, Dunham’s poetry in this collection continually examines the smallest details that might be overlooked if not magnified under the lens of her poetic lines, themselves often compressed into short poems containing tightly controlled stanzas. In fact, if readers recall one of the definitions for “stanza” in its original Italian is “room,” the poetic connection between the intimate spaces of our surroundings and the compact language Dunham presents in the stanzas of her poems seems even more apparent.

Much of the inspiration for Dunham comes from artists who specialized in reduced forms, such as miniaturist paintings, still life drawings, or boxed collage assemblages. Even when the source of her work is a larger painting or a found photograph, Dunham zooms in on a detail from the art or a minor feature in the picture. Nevertheless, the poetry in this collection that uses visual art for motivation rarely appears restricted to simply an ekphrastic explanation of an artwork. Instead, the objects studied usually serve to initiate intriguing twists and inventive turns toward an imaginative or introspective direction. Additionally, Dunham’s lovely images are frequently as vivid and luminous as the framed artistic visions she examines.

The relationship between mother and child, Rebecca Dunham with her young son, continually appears as another significant theme in the pages of this book, and these thematic poems are appealing as a series that shows an even more intimate glimpse at the poet, particularly exposing emotions of her motherly love, a fear of vulnerability, and an anxiety for the future. Repeatedly, in these pieces the child might be viewed as another “miniature,” one that opens up to the speaker and her readers an entire world of possibilities, as well as a new life that can be celebrated, yet at the same time urges further concerns, including thoughts about mortality or the mere end of innocence and beauty as witnessed regularly in nature’s seasonal shift.

As is the case with many first books by poets, some of the poems contain hints of influence or recognition of past masters. Observing Dunham’s careful crafting of lines and meticulous attention to detail, one should not be surprised to find “Phial: Elizabeth Bishop at Age 6.” Indeed, if any previous poet’s characteristics might be seen as model for Dunham’s work, Bishop represents a likely candidate. In “Oxidation,” the poem immediately following the poet’s nod to Bishop, Dunham again directs readers’ memories toward a past poet and, in this case, a specific classic poem. When she describes rust patterns (“the fine / red lace cast its veil”) in the blue paint on an abandoned wheelbarrow, the obvious connection between this poem and William Carlos Williams’ red wheelbarrow only seems to enhance a reader’s delight. Elsewhere, in “Curator of Fruit,” one cannot help but think once more of Williams’ plums when Dunham concludes the poem, which previously had mentioned plums among the fruit, with lines that describe “the sap’s inexplicable rise / to sky, & early morning, love / heavy with the smell of winter / pears, firm & crisp & cold.” Less successfully in “Vernal Equinox,” Dunham evokes readers’ recollections of James Wright when she borrows one of his most famous phrases for her closing lines: “I want to break / into blossom, my limbs flailing / in air’s current like a man on fire.” Here, one’s familiarity with the “break into blossom” phrase seems to slightly undercut the surprise, originality, and impact in the poem’s final lines.

On perhaps a trivial note, I must wonder about the effectiveness in the idiosyncratic use of ampersands throughout the volume. In the works of a number of poets, as well as in some poems held in this collection, such a mannerism doesn’t draw much attention or cause distraction, and in many cases may even add to a persuasively casual voice. For example, I remember when Larry Levis adopted that technique in mid-career, contributing to his poetry, which had become more expansive and conversational. However, given the splendidly organized lines and precise language of Dunham’s tightly constructed poetry, the use of an ampersand sometimes seems off key, more informal and less elegant, amid those grace notes in the eloquent voice her poetry often presents. This tactic is particularly noticeable when the ampersand begins a line or a sentence, or both (“Harem of Saint Marcia”), and when placed within a poem with a somewhat formal sonnet organization (“Ontology of the Miniature Room”).

Putting aside that admittedly minor quibble, I find the wealth of details and depth of textured images in this book to be captivating. Rebecca Dunham’s exquisitely refined poetry exhibits the finer attributes usually associated with miniature paintings and still life arrangements. John Ashbery once wrote about Joseph Cornell’s box compositions, “matter and manner fuse to form a new element,” going on to label the art as one that is “enchanted.” When we consider the original meaning of “enchanted” refers to being put under a spell by the power of song, this term may also apply well to lyrical poems in The Miniature Room. Indeed, in this collection, Rebecca Dunham combines precisely described images with compelling and compact content, presenting a fresh blend that lends toward a rich and rewarding reading of her enchanting poetry.

Dunham, Rebecca. The Miniature Room. Truman State University Press, 2006.

Brian Turner: HERE, BULLET

During the last year, I have returned to read Brian Turner’s Here, Bullet a number of times. As stark scenes of violence continue in television news clips and on the covers of news magazines, I have found myself repeatedly seeking this poet-soldier’s images, written in concise lines of poetry that at times appear intimate, yet often also maintain an ability to present a bit more of the differing perspectives of other Americans or Iraqis ensnared by the circumstances of combat and survival, poems of personal considerations and experiences that somehow strike a widespread interest and have assumed a greater public significance.

Turner, who served seven years in the U.S. Army, including tours of duty in Bosnia-Herzegovina and then Iraq, is also an MFA graduate from the University of Oregon’s creative writing program. With Here, Bullet Turner follows in the footsteps of other American writers who have eloquently recorded emotionally charged front-line observations during a time of war. Indeed, Walt Whitman, Ernest Hemingway, and Tim O’Brien seem among the primary influences on Turner (the Vietnam War poems of Bruce Weigl and Yusef Komunyakaa may also play a part). In interviews Turner has acknowledged a debt to O’Brien’s works (especially Going After Cacciato), and like O’Brien in his fiction, this poet often focuses on details that lend a persuasive sense of authenticity or authority to the voice in the poems, even when pieces involve fanciful scenes or surreal dream-like narratives.

Recognition of Hemingway’s influence appears early in the book as a quote from Papa opens the initial poem: “This is a strange new kind of war where you learn just as much as you are able to believe.” Throughout the poetry in Here, Bullet Turner displays his attempts at understanding the conditions in which he, his fellow soldiers, and the Iraqi citizens must endure day after day in order to survive. He wants to believe the terrible sacrifice of lives will be worth it in the end; however, by the final poem in this volume readers will witness indications Turner has lost all hope the cost of the war will be warranted, let alone rewarded by a better future. Like the wounded Harold Krebs in Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home,” who comes back from combat and reads books about his battlefront, seeing in them a different war than the one he experienced, Turner’s speaker in “Ferris Wheel” comments: “The history books will get it wrong.” Nevertheless, one of the most important characteristics of this volume remains Turner’s almost complete avoidance of any overtly political commentary or editorializing, reserving his sole focus for the presentation of powerful actions and clearly depicted individuals, allowing readers, if they wish, to form their own opinions on political concerns or controversial issues.

Admirably, Turner tries to offer different versions and to identify differing visions of the events related throughout the book by learning various aspects of local language, customs, and religious beliefs. The speaker in these poems desires a way to understand and empathize with those whose country is caught in the crossfire of conflict. In recent comments, Turner has voiced great admiration for the writings of John Balaban, particularly Remembering Heaven’s Face, a memoir about his relationships with the Vietnamese people he met—learning their language, literature, and culture—during a time in which he volunteered to work in the war zone even though he’d been granted conscientious objector status. Readers can appreciate Turner’s compliment to Balaban just as they also may appreciate the complementary elements in each author’s approach to the subjects in their writings.

Some of the poems in this book seem like contemporary camp scenes reminiscent of the Civil War campfire poems by Walt Whitman, as soldier's are portrayed in ordinary circumstances while on base or enjoying a lull after curfew. In “Cole’s Guitar” Turner’s language most closely resembles Walt Whitman’s voice when he catalogs images of America evoked by the sound of a comrade’s six-string. “I’m hearing America now,” Turner writes as he lists various everyday events he imagines taking place back home. By the final lines of the poem (which is recorded as taking place in Al Ma’badi, Iraq), Turner’s speaker reveals seeing strangers’ faces “the way ghosts might visit the ones they love, / as I am now, listening to America….”

Although, as with almost all first books of poetry (one could say all books of poetry), there are a handful of poems that clearly stand as the strongest in this collection, a number of compelling poems draw the reader from the opening piece introduced by the Hemingway quote through to the closing work in the book. However, one poem in Here, Bullet deserves to be identified not only as an outstanding work in this volume, but also as one of the finer pieces by any poet in recent years. “2000 lbs.” is a poem that freezes in time the moment a terrorist suicide bomber triggers his explosives in a town square of Mosul. In sectioned passages of the poem, Turner provides readers with brief profiles introducing some of the victims in the blast—what they are doing, what pasts they have experienced, whom they love and by whom they are loved, what hopes for the future they hold, where they are headed—when their lives are suddenly and shockingly destroyed.

Among the victims arbitrarily targeted are American soldiers, as well as Iraqi men and women, including one old woman who “cradles her grandson, / whispering, rocking him on her knees / as though singing him to sleep.” Consequently, in addition to fixing in time an isolated moment of horror in the center of a war zone, Turner also aptly captures an iconic act emblematic of an entire period of history. Few poems show such potential for moving readers so emotionally while at the same time inviting intellectual and ethical reflection, requesting that readers investigate the tenuous thread by which any life hangs. Considering the state of ongoing world tensions, I know I surely will be returning to this collection of poems again and again with similar unanswered questions to those raised by the speaker of “Night in Blue”: “What do I know / of redemption or sacrifice, what will I have / to say of the dead—that it was worth it, / that any of it made sense?”

Turner, Brian. Here, Bullet. Alice James Books, 2005.

Lynda Hull: COLLECTED POEMS

The recent appearance of Lynda Hull’s Collected Poems is a welcome surprise. This book is the initial entry in the new Graywolf Poetry RE/VIEW Series, edited by Mark Doty, which will bring back into print essential collections of contemporary poetry. (Collected Poems also carries an insightful introduction by Yusef Komunyakaa that acts as an enticing invitation into the poetry of Lynda Hull.) The series could not have begun with a better selection. I remember the interest with which I would read Hull’s poems when they first appeared in literary journals and her two early books. I also recall the sadness upon learning the news of her untimely death in 1994 and the silencing of such a fine poetic talent.

In 1995 Lynda Hull’s husband, poet David Wojahn, who contributes an afterword to Collected Poems, saw to the posthumous publication of The Only World, the book she had already finished at the time of her death. Like her previous two collections, Star Ledger and Ghost Money, the poems in her final volume display a vivid and gritty lyricism often built upon observations of others' difficult circumstances, as well as the honest chronicling of complex experiences lived by the poet. However, works in The Only World achieved an even higher level of attention to craft and intensity in content, including the powerful “Suite for Emily,” a compelling extended sequence at the center of the collection that addresses a young woman's death from AIDS contracted during injections of heroin.

Reading "Suite for Emily," one might easily be reminded of the emotional tension and forceful language in Allen Ginsberg's "Howl." However, Hull's elegy to Emily conjures up allusions to Dickinson within the lines of the poem: "I'm thinking of Dickinson's letter, / 'Many who were in their bloom have gone / to their last account and the mourners go about // the streets.'" The conditions in which Hull's friend Emily is depicted at the time leading to her death display an individual whose world has collapsed as much as any vein too often stabbed by an addict's needle: "Emily's // in prison again, her child's lost to the State, / Massachusetts. Fatigue, pneumonia, / the wasting away."

The poet describes a closeness that once existed between herself and Emily before Hull ("the one who was left") was able to escape the dangerous and sordid street life described so arrestingly throughout the poem: "We were so young we'd spend & spend / ourselves as if there'd be no reckoning, then grew / past caring." Emily serves as Lynda Hull's doppelganger in this piece that highlights the divergent lives the two women finally chose: "Parallel lives, the ones / I didn't choose, the one that kept her."

By the close of Hull's wonderfully moving poem her voice transitions from resembling Ginsberg's to perhaps that of Sylvia Plath during a section in which she presents an "Address" to Death: "Death you have taken my friends & dwell / with my friends. You are the human wage. / Death I am tired of you." When Hull eventually encounters the absence of Emily, of other friends, of the life she once lived, her comments appear nearly to invoke a dreaded sense of isolation (although a survivor, a woman almost lost amid emotional exhaustion): "Off the lake a toothed wind keens / & it's just me here, the one who's left." I had believed Hull's "Suite for Emily" to be one of the lost treasures of American poetry's last two decades, and I'm thrilled it may now be rediscovered by many more readers.

One could conclude the whole of Hull’s poems sometimes feels cinematic, perhaps filled with scenes from a magnificent film noir, and the tone of the poetry often appears to mimic the beautifully tense or hauntingly expressive music one might hear in improvisations by Charlie Parker or Chet Baker, just two of the jazz figures included in her work who influenced the rhapsodic songs of Hull’s poems. For many, this book, which includes all three of Hull’s volumes, will serve as an introduction to the poet, and I’m sure the loss of her passionate voice will be felt again when each reader reaches the final page of poetry.

Hull, Lynda. Collected Poems. Graywolf Press, 2006.