“Vetiver,” the first poem in this collection, is one of my favorites: the slow grace of it: image, image, image, motion, the shift from the first stanza to the casual “Well, it just kind of came apart in the hand” of the second (p 3).
“The Ice Storm” is a poem in which to feel adrift. I love the first line: “Isn’t really a storm of course because unlike most storms it isn’t one till it’s over and people go outside and say will you look at that” (p 26). The first paragraph continues, pleasingly, to talk about the winter: ” our favorite of the seasons, the one that goes by quickest although you almost never hear anyone say, I wonder where the winter has gone” (ibid.). But then there’s this vagueness: you wonder where the poem is going, and why, but then so does the poem: “I want to cut out of this conversation or discourse. Why? Because it doesn’t seem to be leading anywhere” (p 27). Or later: “Only I stay here alone, waiting for it to reach the point of cohesion” (p 28). Does it cohere? Maybe, but even if it doesn’t, the language is a delight.
The selection from “Flow Chart,” a long section of an even longer poem, was bewildering to me, but then there were images like “clouds stacked up in a holding pattern/like pictures in a nineteenth-century museum” that made me keep reading (p 37).
Elsewhere: there are two pantoums, a form I really really like. The first, “Hotel Lautréamont,” is longer and doesn’t rhyme; “Seasonal” is shorter and rhyming; they’re both satisfying to read: a sense of unwinding, the rhythm of a courtly dance, steps forward, steps back. Other highlights: an untitled poem commissioned by an artist for a bridge, about places, crossing, destinations, which includes this: “Steel and air, a mottled presence, small panacea and lucky for us,” which makes me grin (107). I like the conceit of “Myrtle,” which starts with the idea of tracing a name back to its source like a river, then moves from there. “My Philosophy of Life” is smart and conversational and satisfying; “Sleepers Awake” is funny and strange, its first stanza a list of statements like: “Cervantes was asleep when he wrote Don Quixote.” and “Joyce slept during the Wandering Rocks section of Ulysses” (180). ” As I kept reading this book I found it increasingly difficult, obscure.
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