Born in 1927, Willis Barnstone is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Indiana University and an admired translator . His rendering of The Poems of St John of the Cross is rightly revered by believers, non believers, scholars and general readers. His translations of texts essential to understanding Judeo-Christian history , including The Other Bible: Jewish Pseudepigrapha, Christian Apocrypha, and his work on Kabbalah, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, are masterful restorations, and he has edited, co-edited and compiled many anthologies. He has also published seventeen volumes of poetry and three memoirs, all displaying the range and profundity (a word I use sparingly) of his creative and spiritual appetites.

Those appetites have led to previously hidden or distorted meanings in material he encounters, bringing to bear his understanding of Greek , (the language into which the Bible was first translated) Aramaic, (the everyday spoken language of Jesus and his neighbors) Hebrew (the language used in Jewish places of worship) and the cultures these languages are entwined with. By the time Barnstone gets through with text, it is more precisely accurate, and often beautiful.

The Poems of Jesus Christ are excerpted from his Restored New Testament, which Norton published in 2009. It is no secret that The King James Version of the Bible, thanks in part to its popularity and melodious sound, had an immense and ongoing effect on writers. For all its linguistic and musical influence (I am in love with that sound), it was written in paragraphs that obscure the shapes of the poetry of the original.

The Prophets and Psalmists of the Old Testament, and Jesus of the New, spoke in poetry, and Barnstone puts Jesus back where He belongs. Part of his method is to share samples of poems by Whitman and Heaney that are threaded with Biblical references, some very clear, some a little obscure, reinforcing my conviction—one that may strike some as old fashioned—that Biblical studies are essential to understanding literature.

Barnstone is modest, fair, and generous with credit. In his introduction he mentions that the 1966 Jerusalem Bible was the first to put the Gospels into verse, and “liberates all words of Jesus from prose lineation.” That Bible was produced by Jesuits and is a glorious milestone, enriched when reflecting on The Poems of Jesus Christ.

It is no secret that poetry can be memorized with efforts that seem natural, as opposed to what it takes to own prose. This has much to do with how the body absorbs rhythm and sound, and how spirit processes sound. So in restoring the words of Jesus to their rightful poetry, and making an excellent case for this necessity, Barnstone brings their music, passion, ethics and intellectual rigor into a more complete view.

Every page in this project is backlit by scholarship and appreciation for what he encounters. Noting that “The Gospel of John is unparalleled in the Bible,” he reminds us that its “prologue is magical for believers and nonbelievers, a singular moment in religious scripture and world literature.” He goes on to say that “The first luminous lines of John are not lines of poetry spoken by Jesus, but a poetic account of Jesus’ voyage to the earth.” It makes perfect sense to declare:

In the beginning was the word
And the word was with God,
And the word was God.

The entire verse is quoted, accompanied with clarifications containing Hebrew and Greek, speaking to God’s achievement of making matter from word. Atheists and agnostics can also recognize that this is powerful to contemplate if one cares about what words do. This makes it the appropriate prologue to every speech of Jesus as John reports :

Get these things out of here!
Do not make the house of my father
A house of business!

This famous passage highlights Jesus’ fury at the commerce in the temple, and the Barnstone translation is stronger and more alive than its predecessors, bringing one closer to the speaker, which is the goal of every translator’s effort. It is also a reminder of what Barnstone calls the “solo performance” of Jesus, whose life story is one of constant connection with people, including his adoring Mother, even when they found him weird to the point of unfathomable.

Utterance is effort to persuade, so even if one does not accept the divinity of Jesus, Barnstone has strengthened the voice here. When Jesus tells a woman that he does not condemn her, the poetic form bolsters the morality of compassion, intensifying its necessity :

Woman, where are they?
Has no one condemned you?
Neither do I condemn you.

The Jewishness of Jesus and his spoken language, Aramaic, have taken centuries to get used to, and in those centuries have suffered much abuse. In titles to each passage of poetry, Barnstone’s gifts often remind us of that, in a manner so restorative it could be called soothing were the message(s) of Jesus not so radical. In the Gospel of John, 10.25-28, 30, the title is both a reminder of occurrence , and an indirect reference to word and light :

HANNUKKAH IN YERUSHALAYIM, YESHUA
ANNOUNCES HE IS THE SON OF GOD

Hannukka is celebrated as the festival of lights and miracles, the unexpected gift after great travail. So listener/reader is linked by Barnstone to immeasurable brilliance. This happens on many occasions when Jesus speaks in these pages:

Be Children of Light

For a little time longer the light is with you.
Walk about while you have the light
So that the darkness may not overtake you.
If you walk in the darkness
You do not know where you are going.
While you have light, believe in the light
So you may be the children of light.

The Poems of Jesus Christ is a book that shimmers with intellectual, spiritual and literary grandeur, to be engaged with for generations. Keep it within reach, for the “living water” the finest undertakings bestow.

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Dear Readers:

Rarely does a review warrant a foreward, not to mention an afterword. I hope what follows explains
what I’ve done.

FOREWORD

In an uncharacteristically inept, mean-spirited piece in the November 24th New York Review of Books, Helen Vendler, whom I have praised here and elsewhere, failed to prove that her view of 20th century American verse should prevail over Rita Dove’s choices and thinking as expressed in The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry, which Dove edited. Dove is a former U. S. Poet Laureate, and her December 23rd NYRB response was graceful, reasonable and pained. The poetry blogosphere, to no surprise, exploded in the time between essays, and people also noted Vendler’s final words in December : “I have written my review and I stand by it.”

It is clear from Vendler’s review that she wants a canon carved in marble. It is clear from Dove’s introduction to the anthology, and from her selections, that she just wanted an engaging, informative, high -quality collection. She succeeded.

/////////////////////////////////////////////////

Not long ago I would have said of many, “Their work will last.” Now I believe it is more fair-minded to say, “Their work deserves to last,” because changes in the way we access words are taking place so quickly. The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry is an immensely welcome addition to the mix and it covers A LOT of worthwhile, thrilling territory in a relatively small amount of space. Let’s hope it’s soon available electronically, or issued in paperback with a CD.

The collection is a valid model of an establishment icon. Guggenheims, Pulitzers, Lenore Marshall Awards, National Book Awards, Lannan Awards, Yale Younger Poets Awards, National Endowment For the Arts Grants and , Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, before and after the post was renamed U. S. Poet Laureate—these are among the accolades in brief biographies of most contributors. If I had the time, or an intern, it would be interesting to count how many have won each prize mentioned.

Dove notes that she has benefited from the poetry establishment even while feeling invisible at one of its hallowed institutions – The Iowa Writers Workshop, where many contributors also studied. “Invisible” always jumps out at me because I am married to a Chinese-American well-recognized in his field, and he sometimes uses that word to describe his early professional life. Dove is understandably sympathetic to writers who have felt that way, but her sympathies and ear are also broad.

The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry will be gratifying to teachers, novice readers or writers, and anyone wishing to know more about how writers responded to the twentieth century. Thanks to the age of Google, I can hope that the one fine poem by Olga Broumas will encourage those unfamiliar with her to hit the search engines . Broumas is especially intriguing because, like former US Poet Laureate Charles Simic, who is also included, English is not her native tongue. Thanks to “Facing It,” by Yusef Komunyakaa, I am reminded not just of the Vietnam War, but the memorial in Washington that caused such an uproar. The first few lines mirror the sculptor’s stated intentions and the poem continues, gaining a power as strong the memorial itself, and the offerings left at its base.

My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn’t,
dammit : No tears.
I’m stone. I’m flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night
slanted against morning. I turn
this way—the stone lets me go.
I turn that way—I’m inside
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.

T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens are of course represented, along with Robert Lowell, Langston Hughes, Marianne Moore, Denise Levertov, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, and the barely visible (outside of poetry circles) but worthy Pulitzer-winner, Henry Taylor. I wish Dove had had more space, so that, for example, readers might learn that Maxine Kumin’s “How It Is ’’ was written for her dear friend Anne Sexton, and that the women studied together and critiqued each other’s poems. It’s worth mentioning that Frank Bidart, who has a poem here, also co-edited the defining Lowell collection and that Lowell taught at Iowa. Philip Levine, the current U. S. Poet Laureate, was among his students, and is well represented. In a recent talk in San Francisco, Levine mentioned Komunyakaa as someone who also deserves the post. Amen.

Much has been made about terrible screeds Dove chose, by June Jordan and Amiri Baraka. Part of what makes these choices so painful to see is that both have written far better poetry that addresses their anger than what these lines spew:

…..Look at the Liberal
Spokesman for the jews clutch his throat
& puke himself into eternity.

That’s from Baraka’s ‘’SOS’’, and June Jordan’s, “I am the history of rape,” is from “Poem About My Rights,” which is grandiose and unsubtle, accurate and sincere. The very good news is that these instances are anomalous and that there is so much compelling poetry in this collection that no review can do it justice, any more than any anthology as fine as this can do justice to every poet in it.

Sometimes there are reasons beyond the control and desires of editors when considering whom to include, so it’s a disappointment and a relief to have Dove note that estate complications kept Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg and Sterling Brown out of the volume . Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael Palmer, Harryette Mullen, Frederick Seidel, John Ashbery, Stephen Dunn. All are in, thankfully. Adrienne Rich, Marilyn Chin. William Meredith. Robert Hayden. I’m not listing these poets in order of appearance. I’m saying READ THEM HERE. READ MORE OF THEM ELSEWHERE. In “Nocturne : Blue Waves,” Laurie Sheck writes that “There are times when the mind/knows no wholeness.” Fine poetry addresses that condition and with the kind of particulars Sheck goes on to name, begins the healing.

Jorie Graham, also high on my list for U. S. Poet Laureate, has a poem in this volume with a number of lines that serve as metaphor for why Dove has succeeded so well. I will end with lines from “San Sepolcro’’ :

This is
what the living do : go in.
It’s a long way.
And the dress keeps opening
from eternity
to privacy, quickening.
Inside, at the heart,
is tragedy, the present moment
forever stillborn,
but going in, each breath
is a button
coming undone, something terribly
nimble-fingered
finding all of the stops.

This IS what the living do, and this book is a welcome trail-marker on the way to going in.

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

AFTERWORD : Anyone who has been seriously reading poetry for more than a few years will be glad to own this book and will probably wish for additional poets to be included, not at the expense of anyone else. Here are a few of my choices : Louise Gluck, Fanny Howe, Ed Roberson, C. S. Giscombe, Jane Hirshfield, Brad Leithauser, Amy Clampitt, Charles Martin, August Kleinzahler.

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Peter Gizzi writes immensely satisfying, supple poems, and his fifth collection provides evidence of a well-lived, not always permeable vision on every page. Threshold Songs is the perfect accompaniment for an interior instrument, reminding the reader of one’s own riches, by making them as new as the poems. What is seen and heard in each word becomes an essential part of a musical ensemble, well-rehearsed with the rigorous knowledge brought to the project, but never feeling stiff. Gizzi’s particular gift is to posit that shifting location where senses meet the terrible and the sublime, where political portent or its brittle actualities announce themselves in various configurations. To do this without stumbling is a major accomplishment.

“The Growing Edge” which begins the volume, is painful, alert in a manner that is almost spine-tingling:

There is a spike
in the air
a distant thrum
you call singing
and how many nights
this giganto, torn
turned, I wonder if
you hear me
I mean I talk
to myself through you
hectoring air
you’re out there
tonight and so am I
for as long as
I remember
I talk to the air
what is it
to be tough
what ever
do you mean
how mistaken
can I be, how
did I miss it
as I do entirely
and admit very
well then
I know nothing
of the world

It’s a three-page uphill/downhill path here, and not a word is wasted. He has, as they say, nailed it at the end, like an archer in an earlier century :

I mean the whole
Vortex of home
buckling inside
a deep sea whine
flash lightning
birth storms
weather of pale
blinding life

There’s not much to add to this essential, alchemy, and the shorter pieces contain just as much power. “Fragment, ” below, in full, works as a kind of sculpture that could be on permanent, always invigorating display in a museum garden:

When you wake to brick outside the window

when you accept this handmade world

when you see yourself inside and accept its picture

when you feel the planet spin, accelerate, make dust
        of everything beneath your bed

when you say I want to live and the light that breaks
        is an inward light

when you feel speed of days, speed of light

if one could fancy vision then let it be of you

let it be thought breaking in your view.

Reading this, and most Gizzi poems, is like paying a call on a living repository where art, physics, astronomy and exalted subtleties of emotion meet at newly decisive brink. To give a Gizzi poem its due is to be enriched by becoming more attentive. This can and should, of course, be said of any poem, but Gizzi’s work refines the process with such finesse that he almost seems to be creating a new, ephemeral form one wants to keep always at hand.

“Oversong” could be reconfigured as a charcoal sketch prized for the places where light enters, departs, leaves a mark or a leaves a space that is itself an indispensible mark:

To be dark, to darken
to obscure, shade, dim

to tone down, to lower
overshadow, eclipse

to obfuscate, adumbrate
to cast into the shade

becloud, bedim, be-
darken, to cast a shadow

throw a shade, throw
a shadow, to doubt

to dusk, extinguish
to put out, blow out

to exit, veil, shroud
to murk, cloud, to jet

in darkness, Vesta
midnight, Hypnos

Thanatos, dead of night
Sunless, dusky, pitch

starless, swart, tenebrous
Inky, Erebus, Orpheus

vestral, twilit, sooty, blue….

Those ellipses are his, as deliberate and utterly fitting as the ancient allusions and everything else here. “Tenebrous” with its connection to Easter liturgy and mystery, serves as a well-placed pebble of acknowledgement that prayer, song, poetry are enigmatic vessels for what cannot always be contained.

“History is Made at Night,” a ten-part construction, is close to impeccable and always exhilarating, though sometimes a little too blunt as in :

But what else is there
when so many are asleep
in this age of sand, yes, sand
in the eyes and in the heart.
Its hard to get a footing,
the mechanics are exhausting.

No doubt they are, and in a piece that faces head-on dismay with inventions and their corroded half-deaths (“Cars in the yards/make ugly sounds/and the animals/touching them smell bad.”) and “Gmail” one accepts, even gathers in, the immensity of the ache while still wishing for sails to be trimmed closer to the wind, more distant from the commonplaces. That said, “History is Made at Night” is as a whole is bold and striking, an erudite creation, a description that also fits the entire volume. Closing the poem, Gizzi reminds :

Even daylight is historic
if you think on it
if you really feel its cold rays,
old poetry, spreading evenly
over as far as you can see.

It’s all fair game and nothing is unimportant. Everything must be experienced and noted, which is, he understands, impossible, and even the most far-seeing cannot see with enough precision. The warmest among us will experience, if not comprehend, cold rays.

In “Bardo,” the next to last poem in THREESHOLD SONGS, the marvelous title is joltingly apt, and the lines cohere with integrity :

I’ve spent my life
in a lone mechanical whine,

this combustion far off.
How fathomless to be

embedded in glacial ice,
what piece of self hiding there/

I am not sure about meaning
but understand the wave.

By the end of the poem, the questions he raises are the ones that must be asked :

And if I say the words
will you know them?

Is there world?
Are they still calling it that?

Peter Gizzi is on an arduous quest. Everyone who reads him should find their own journey given a superior sustenance.

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Born in 1936, Marge Piercy has made decisions that serve as scaffolding for her poetry and fiction. She has stayed actively true to her progressive, feminist convictions. She has returned, with depth, to Jewish traditions she was born into. She has maintained a complicated appreciation for the natural world, especially the environs of her Cape Cod home. She has remained in a long, loving marriage of encouraging equals, to Ira Wood, her sometime collaborator, and co-instructor when leading writing workshops. She’s also kept her sense of humor.

She harnesses worldly concerns with matters of the soul, with a straightforward beauty that provides many examples from The Hunger Moon—New and Selected Poems, 1980-2010. It is her eighteenth volume of poetry.

“The visitation,” from What Are Big Girls Made Of? weaves in and out of the moment, making it exquisitely current :

The yearling doe stands by the pile of salt
hay, nibbling and then strolls up the path.
Among the spring flowers she stands amazed,
hundreds of daffodils, forsythia,
the bright chalices of tulips, crimson,
golden, orange streaked with green, the wild tulips
opening like stars fallen on the ground.

This, and more, before Piercy makes her point with language that is as right to see and hear as the deer is both lovely and a symbol of rough reality :

Graceful among the rhododendrons, I know
what her skittish courage represents : she
is beautiful as those sub-Saharan children
with huge luminous brown eyes of star-
vation. A hard winter following a hurricane,
tangles of downed trees even the deer
cannot penetrate, a long slow spring
with the buds obdurate as pebbles,
too much building, so she comes to stand
in our garden, eyes flowering with wonder
under the incandescent buffet of the fruit
trees, this garden cafeteria she has walked
into to graze, from the lean late woods.

Never be misled by forthright declarations in a Piercy poem. Each reverberates music it was meant to sound, as in “Wellfleet Shabbat” from The Art Of Blessing the Day:

The hawk eye of the sun slowly shuts.
The breast of the bay is softly feathered
dove grey. The sky is barred like the sand
when the tide trickles out.
The great doors of Shabbat are swinging
open over the ocean, loosing the moon
floating up slow distorted vast, a copper
balloon just sailing free.
The wind slides over the waves, patting
them with its giant hand, and the sea
stretches its muscles in the deep,
purrs and rolls over.
The sweet beeswax candles flicker
and sigh, standing between the phlox
and the roast chicken. The wine shines
its red lantern of joy.
Here on this piney sandspit, the Shekhina
comes on the short strong wings of the seaside
sparrow raising her song and bringing
down the fresh clear night.

“Shekhina” represents devine, female spirit in Jewish life, making this and other poems in the collection, read like prayers one’s foremothers might have wished for, had they time, not to mention a loving spouse who no doubt helps with the meal so that all at the table can be lit by the “red lantern of joy.” Generations of Jewish women fought to learn the language and rituals reserved for men, making Wellfleet Shabbat and its neighbors in these pages a kind of altar of acknowledgement and remembrance, sacred bricks and mortar.

Love poems. Poems confronting war. Poems about cats. All are notoriously difficult to write without falling into dogmatic babble or trite traps. Piercy avoids this, in selection after selection, as in this from “Implications of one-plus one” from Available Light:

Ten years of fitting our bodies together
and still they sing wild songs in new keys.

She suggests they’re still singing even after watching football together, deliciously possessing him and the game, announcing “Football is mine,” in “Football for dummies” a recent composition. The poem is pure fun, and you cheer for everyone.

“Peace in a Time of war,” quoted in part, makes my point about war poems and highlights Piercy’s versatility once more :

Ceremony is a moat we have
crossed into a moment’s
harmony as if the world paused –
but it doesn’t. What we must
do waits like coats tossed
on the bed for us to rise
from this warm table
put on again and go out.

And then there are the poems about cats. As someone who likes dogs and shares a bed with a man and one or more felines, I’ve written my share of terrible cat poems and am always on the prowl for good ones by others. In “Old cat crying,” as in all topics she seizes, Piercy is empathetically masterful, and in this case the mastery connects feline need to human need and loss :

He should not have died
before her. She cries
for him to come. She
sniffed his body and knew,
but she has forgotten
and he does not come.

Piercy apprehends what conventional wisdom sometimes disdains. We humans show emotion in ways, like sniffing (who among us has not sniffed a garment recalling scent of a long-gone love?) that can seem both feral and genuine.

Not surprisingly, for someone whose prose includes Sleeping With Cats, A Memoir, Piercy ends with a poem about the death of a cat. Like this entire collection, and like Breaking Camp, her first volume of poetry, published by Wesleyan in 1968, and well worth repeat visits, “End of days” engages the senses and enlarges them. Cats “see clearly/through hooded eyes, “we are informed, before being reminded how terrible it is to face the end of life while confined in “the silent scream of hospitals.”

Marge Piercy’s unflinching clarity of vision continues to be the kind of sturdy example so vital to literature. She has long been teaching and in the public arena, on the humane side of almost every contemporary issue. Lesser poets, lesser citizens have been appointed United States Poet Laureate. It’s her turn.

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Like not nearly enough writers of his generation, W.S. Di Piero is more often than not superb, and is always interesting. Nitro Nights, his latest collection of poetry, is from Copper Canyon Press, and like its predecessors, it is intelligent and accessible, with an affecting modesty. Credit his many years producing art criticism, and his many years teaching at Stanford. Of course not every teacher or critic becomes a fine poet. Ideally, critics and teachers are humbled by their vocations and the artistry the vocations expose them to, encouraging effort to stay fresh , emotionally resonant and intellectually worthwhile. Say yes to all of the above when the subject is Di Piero.

“Only in Things” is imbedded with indebted associations to William Carlos Williams (quoted in this volume’s epigraph) and still clearly independent :

Some days, who can stare at swathes of sky,
leafage and bad-complected whale-gray streets,
tailpipes and smokestacks orating sepia exhaust,
or the smaller enthusiasms of pistil and mailbox key,
and not weep for the world’s darks on lights, lights on darks,
how its halftones stay unchanged in their changings,
or how turning wheels and wind-trash and revolving doors
weave us into wakefulness or dump us into distraction?
This constant stream of qualia we feel in our stomachs.
The big-leafed plant lifts its wings to greet the planet’s chemistry,
the sun arrives on rooftops like a gentle stranger, rain rushes us
love to love, stop to stop, these veins of leaf, hand, storm and stream,
as if in pursuit of us and what we are becoming.

I once gagged at a reading when a mediocre writer was compared to Hopkins, and I believe it wise to be cautious and prickly when making connections to the greats. “Only in Things,” nods to Yeats’ “pavements gray” of “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” in “the bad-complected whale-gray streets,” and also brings to mind the urgent tenderness Ed Roberson, a poet I recently praised lavishly.

It is sweet (not cloying) that the last line takes in the poet and his creative lineage, as well as anyone else’s place in natural and built environments. All this, without sounding overcrowded, and always utterly inevitable, as is “Sea to Shining Sea (III):”

Shaken awake, get my ticket punched, time feels columnar and the vertigo makes me shiver : March, riding the New York-to-Boston Regional, my San Francisco air back home pounded by rainstorms that scroll hillsides more tighly green while things here get whippy and skinny with the season’s denials. The same liquid intimacy with trains as when I rode a musty Pullman with an aunt taking me to a ball game. No, the circus. Evergreens washing past the window, the only tickle of color a witch hazel’s yellow leaf-sprouts in a Boston backyard.

The train keeps moving, but this is a good place to stop, or at least to try to, because that train’s motion, the way Di Piero writes it, is right here. Immobile words so well arranged, can’t stop it, any more than vision can be blinded to the ‘season’s denials” and the “color of witch hazel.” The idea of “imagery” in poetry can feel like a bad high school class unless its as original as “liquid intimacy with trains,” and “color of witch hazel’s yellow leaf-sprouts. “

Di Piero was born in Philadelphia in 1945, and now lives in San Francisco. He is obviously well traveled, literally and imaginatively, and he never commits the mortal sins of being apologetic or bombastic. For all the deft jitteriness in many poems, compositions are deeply at home in their “American Skin.” This is true wherever he is, including Paterson, the last word in “Sea to Shining Sea,” shouted by the club car hostess after “Pines reduced to the horizontals of their branches, / scorings, staves in the air, a swift lyric continuity,then an old fallen stone/wall, talus and scree.”

Words as loaded as “Paterson,” deserve to be used with the kind of controlled abandon displayed here. Aside to Rumpus readers , just in case : “American Skin” is a Springsteen song that made many urbanites very unhappy. Many of them were cops whose beats Di Piero has walked in quiet hours and at hectic times. Di Piero even calls one poem “Dancing in the Dark,” an obscene (Springsteen) appropriation if the poem were not such a ride of potent, immediate intensity, with just enough breathing room to make it bearable:

Pain and ecstasy kissing, tongues and spit and all. What’s happening to the room? All that broken glass in your back and legs, but keep at it, get lost in the motion and the pain will release you and become aboriginal glass, shape-shifting melting sand.

The poem continues, connecting jagged authenticities that fit like a kaleidoscope so finely crafted it could have been made in another century and cost a fortune. The technicolor motion is symphonic and with the last word Semba!, I can hear the drums, in a jazz quartet, in a symphony, in an urban or rural village or on a savannah. I can even hear the band that played with such devastation in the film classic “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” “Dancing in the Dark” makes me want to sweat and makes a vicarious, tangible shimmer, without any kind of pretense.

Nitro Nights is Di Piero’s tenth book of poetry. His most recent before this, Chinese Apples, won a California Book Award, and the Academy of American Poets gave him its first Raiziss de Palchi prize for his translation of This Strange Joy—Selected Poems of Sandro Penne.

After time with the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe and the photographs of Alfred Steiglitz, Carl Sandburg wrote that he “went away shaken and soothed.” Di Piero’s poetry continues to have that effect. He deserves more prizes. Anyone unfamiliar with his earlier poems and prose will find in him the range Sandburg felt and named, necessities that unflinchingly nourish the “ deep heart’s core” of Yeats.

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Erika Meitner’s sharp, insightful third collection, though overly adorned with “panties,” does right by many other reverberating words that get vital, original treatment thanks to her subtle alertness and subtle ear. She is so penetratingly aware of what it means to be young and female that her poems have a broader reach than the title suggests. Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls is a case study for how to observe, recall and (possibly) create from whole cloth with clarity that never becomes brittle.

“Sex Ed” is surely the piece everyone who has experienced it would wish to write, with only minor variations :

The back seat of this car glows blue
in the classroom darkness. The filmstrip
is chattering steadily through its loops, teeth
holding it to the light. We’re slumped
in our seats, legs stretched in the aisles—
unwieldy bursting bundles of spandex,
watermelon lip gloss, hard-ons,
torn jeans, acne scars, unlaced sneakers.

In a few more lines with equally perfect breaks (note placement of “teeth,” “slumped,” “spandex,” “hard-ons” and all the rest),

The flim bleeps suddenly, freezes
In mid-convince—the signal
for classroom discussion , all of us sitting
uncomfortably silent, no one wanting
to be the prude or the slut, the scapegoat.

This straightforwardness is magically deceptive, so smooth it looks easier to accomplish than it is. It makes me consider sharing it with a teenager I know who is, like most girls her age, all too aware of her body. I want her to read it because she deserves to learn that people beyond her circle of loved ones and friends REALLY GET IT, even if film strips (appropriately used here) will seem as ancient to her as rotary dial phones. Meitner is wonderfully apropos as she goes on to ask damningly:

Who decided to leave the most intricate union
of flesh and emotion to health class, to 30 kids
playing Frisbee with sample diaphragms, batting condoms

You know she knows that the answer is probably someone who was force-fed sex-ed with the same choking doses of awkwardness, thrill, irritation and excruciating cluelessness. You know she knows that the course creators and curriculum deciders were also awkward wrecks long ago. By the poem’s beautiful last lines, there is more wisdom, with well woven yearning :

roving lips and tangled limbs, for baseball metaphors
and base desires, for holding each other close
in darkness. The force that drives all flesh,
exhausts, exalts, raises us up, ecstatic.

From schoolroom clumsiness to universal longing, this six-pager is a kind of incantatory introduction for what’s ahead. Everything else is either just as gripping , or very close .

Not surprisingly, Meitner is concerned with shaping time and stopping it, and “ The Contact Notes,” here in its entirety, is the work of a photographer who knows which tools and chemicals best illustrate source:

I tried to reassure the ladies
that it is not an uncommon experience :
symptoms of fatigue and listlessness,
skin sensitivity, a burning feeling

on the face and eyes, fluid discharge.
Though I’m sure it was a sincere fabrication,
excessive brightness is always a hoax.
We need evidence, meticulous theoretical analysis.

No source but the sun could have made
such shadows.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman comes to mind, with her classic novella, The Yellow Wallpaper, and with that association, the moment to pause and say how much I want Meitner to be gratefully indebted to feminist forebears. Glimmers of that debt abound. “Morningside Spiritual” is just one example, held together, and away from implicit victimhood, by just enough action in the voice of the speaker :

I.

Sublimation is the most mysterious process, used to purify substances;
to reach it one must pass through a dark wilderness.

II. The dragging of summer, feet walked out in exhaustion
between Central Park and Broadway, down Cathedral Parkway;
outskirts of the loitering park at dark, scattered crack pipes, cracked-out
catcalls
asking for trouble.

The poem contains six short stanzas, all equally superb, with the example above and the example below (VI) making me think Richard Price would love this as much as I do :

I’ve been all over this city
but I think everything good must be in another state—
gaseous, solid, liquid, light,

                                    crippled angels

                  should con-

                  vey me

                                    right

home.

Titling poems is, to steal from Norman Mailer (who would have made a great double-bill with
Meitner), a “spooky art.” A title can overpower everything that follows it, shade it with off-kilter suggestions, or burden it with unnecessary weight. Meitner avoids these pitfalls, even, and very importantly, with the titles that separate each section of the book. domestic spasm has a propulsive tension applicable to everything in it, and contains a classic in “Treatise on Dwelling:”

There must be a place where everyone
is slippery and lovely and not
up all night. There must be a place
that’s less work that this,
where something compels you
other than comfort and highways
with just two lanes which
won’t snap back or fold
in on themselves like a fitted sheet,
lumped and faded, warm from the dryer.
Everything in the Laundromat
is hot in summer—your head
inside the machine for a moment
to reach the one sock trapped
in back, ear-drum echo.
(Like the echo of your voice
might take you back into the right
dark cave if only you could breathe
more quietly?) The echo started
on a bench by the bay, when he
arranged his head in your lap.
In the photo you look worried, not brave.
A brave transistor radio balanced on his chest.
Your fingers rested on his face.
The face of the radio played static.
The static radio played big band.
The band-radio channeled the sound
of cable cars, the shiver of metal wires,
mechanical ocean, anticipation, waves
of Rube Goldberg or Golgi apparatus—
the apparatus of every bad motel from here
to the next place called home. Home.
is the one who spend more time
trying to find you than anyone else.
Rest there. Choose him.

This is cinematic. and sage.

About a third of the way into “Treatise on Travel” we’re told of a four-year-old whose parents dress her like a baby, not wanting to pay full airfare for her . But the girl will have none of it and announces her name and starts screaming for her own meal. This could be fiction but it’s also a portrait of the truism that kids have killer radar when it comes to nailing parents who deserve it. The last lines loop back to the very first, with loaded images of jellyfish and their capabilities. They’re riveting, serious and moral without moralizing. Just like the whole poem. Just like the whole book.

Read “WalMart Supercenter,” a Rumpus Original Poem by Erika Meitner.

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Anselm Berrigan’s Notes From Irrelevance comes with the kind of big, interesting baggage sometimes best left out of a review. In this case its worth mentioning because he and Wave Books don’t hide his pedigree as the son of poets Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley. His other major baggage is that he has been the director of the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in Manhattan, which gives him and his readers a multifaceted backbreath intimation of influence, much the way reviewers who compose poetry, if their pores are as open as they should be, will be affected by the poems they engage with as they make shape of their essays and verse. I refer to myself, but also to a long list of poets I admire who also write criticism and are as grateful as I am for the opportunity to dig deeper into the work they encounter.
Berrigan makes very clear that influence is of such concern to him that he plans to “make a list/ of all the people who‘ve / influenced me in any way,/ with a brief explanation/ as to how.”

Notes From Irrelevance is a long weave of sentence shimmers with influences of someone who has read and absorbed a rich range, from classics to the most experimental, making each phrasing kinetic with questions about the way he has experienced sound and the sight of letters. It’s a fascinating exercise, suggesting , in addition to parentage, Naropa, and less obviously, Imagists. It’s a book that should probably be read aloud in one sitting, with two or three people taking turns doing the honors. Like the best handcrafted fabric, it contains slubs and nibs and nubs that serve as gentle reminders of technique without overwhelming or scarring the whole.

I returned to writing
in a black and white
sketchbook in the
neighborhood where
I grew down to be
this writing in
accepted denial
of biography’s tension
with anything less
than total capacity
for kindness on the
outside, the surfaces,
the skating conditions
across a version of the
present. But for living
only in passing in the
so-called country I’d
kill all its insect life.
I would. I’d do it
without spite or
resignation . I make no
attempt to grasp time.

We’re on page two, with a few lines on page three, so be prepared to take a demanding, rewarding ride. If you’re going to look at yourself, be rigorous, be brave. Do it as unflinchingly as this, and mix undiluted pretty in with nuanced ugly as Berrigan does :

My sense of my own
history with images is
such that I consciously
developed a willingness
to let them go—to not
take pictures though
I’d keep feverishly
those gifted to me. I
might like the feeling
a photo meant I looked
like something : vanity
to affect to desperate
preservation of a
moment that never
felt settled or even
moment-like. I‘ve kept
hold of some shots
and now let fly an archive
online of pics other
peeps put up that has
very little to do with
me. This is a PG bar.
The tender does not
approve of our vulgarity.

These etched lines, and those farther along, work like scaffolding for everything that comes later, most affectingly :

I find myself walking
through Williamsburg,
Brooklyn, where I lived
some ten to thirteen yrs
ago, in an Italian pocket
by the Lorimer St. L
station, feeling as if
some gnawing vitality
is sheathed in plexiglass
around me, and there’s
the possibility of seeing
some neon reflecting
off the sheaths that
have a passing contour
similar to dust on a
contact lens mixing with
bastardized specks of light

He also plays with verbs into nouns in fresh ways, as he continues on the same page :

pretending to signal
an acid recidivism, but that’s
about as far as it gets, “it”
being my impulse to be
in some state of intensity
or drive that’s rarely ever
been a true encasement
for my measure. I can
imagine in an ordinary
fashion over imagined
conversation with the
boss as well as anyone

“encasement/ for my measure” is a welcome mist of metaphor for everything he has to say, and its an example of the pleasures slow reading can bestow. By the time he gets to measuring grief, or at least attempting to, he’s ready for the word “corrosive,” and the way that word works as an “encasement” for his questioning and naming :
do I not already contain

grief in corrosive images
rendered back at me as
an interruption of being
to be somehow grateful
for? As if lives plucked
from our scans of the
premises could steel us
up for the longer haul
more accurately depicted
by a series of idiosyncrasies

What he does here, and on almost every page, is to fulfill the aspiration of poetry by making shape of mystery. He leaves a reader refreshed, not in a simplistic, pink-lemonade way, but in the way fuel meets insight by illuminating feeling, invigorating thought and recall, making the “longer haul” a place of anticipated urgency. He wants us to be sure that he won’t ever

abandon my desire to
recede in and out of
interconnection
just because I can’t help
spreading out in strange
places form some need
to be seen in my life in
the world alone.

Here are the last lines of Notes From Irrelevance:

I’m nothing if not
polite even in absentia.
Love, Anselm.

“I am the mate and companion of people,” Walt Whitman wrote. I say Amen to that, and to this book.

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Princeton University Press has an admirable poetry in translation series called Facing Pages, and continues to burnish its reputation as a literary citizen with Oranges and Snow, selected poems of Milan Djordjevic. Djordjevic’s work is, for the first time, rendered into English from the Serbian Charles Simic, former United States Poet Laureate, and the decision to print a bilingual edition is especially welcome here. It helps the ear meet the intent of the sound of these poems in a language not widely known. Simic, whose native tongue is Serbian, is clearly the right person for the task.

“Conceived as an encounter between two poets and two languages,” is a direct quote from a press release Princeton issued. Lifting a statement from a press release is a first for me, done in this case because it so neatly encapsulates the tasks and the gifts of what the press is doing, and its contribution to enriching the languages of all who read and write. When I see words in another language, including names in journals, I read aloud, often very slowly, and their music becomes part of me in ways I acknowledge but cannot fully comprehend.

Simic, in his eloquent introduction, declares that “The poet’s mission is not to save the world, but to save some human experiences from oblivion.” His own drive to do that, fueled in part by his forced travels in and from Eastern Europe as a child and young man, add weight to his encounter with Djordjevic’s work. “Overcoat ” is a typically devoted example :

Overcoat lies. On the floor.
Without a drop of blood on it.
Overcoat lies. Weary.
Crumpled, discarded and black.
—Overcoat! Overcoat! Overcoat!
—Dear Brother! Rise! Rise!

Kaput lezi. Na podu.
Bez kapi krvi u sebi.
—Kapute! Kapute! Kapute!
—Mili brate! Ustani! Ustani!

In both languages, the details hammer, the coat as a common vessel with a fraught past that makes it imperatively alive and riveting, like the entire volume. It is also impossible to read without recalling Simic’s note that much of Djordjevic’s work was written before an accident that required much rehabilitation and has left him confined to house and grounds. Djordjevic will never be trapped by any impediment.

In “Dusk” he attains and rejects calm :

I stand on the empty sidewalk, before shop windows.
The city shows me its dark side in its nakedness.
Purple-red reflections caught in the windows,
everything like your open wound and mine.

Stojim na praznam plocniku, pred izlozima.
Kao nogatu grad mi pokazuje svoju tamnu stranu.
Grimiznocrevene odsjaje uhvacene u prozorima,
sve ono sto je nalik na tvoju I moju zivu ranu.

Typing Serbian is a slow but utterly not tedious exercise in absorbing sight and sound. It is also incomplete because my keyboard lacks appropriate accents. Like many Djordjevic poems, “Dusk” is deeply chilling, and when, toward the end, he uses the words “angel” and “doom,” he is not being melodramatic. “Angel” in Serbian sounds much like the English word “angelus” , and the piece becomes, like so much fine poetry, a powerful prayer and an admonition against the worst that humanity provides.

He has faced excruciating choices with a questioning, complex grace, painfully explored in “Book Burning:’’

We are out of wood to heat the house,
and still the weather is cold.
I did something that did not make me happy.
My first book of poems,
ON BOTH SIDES OF THE SKIN,
yes, we brought the copies up from the cellar,
took them out of the packages they were wrapped in,
and threw them in the yellow tile stove
and the black metal one. I’m burning books
I wrote a long time ago and doing so remember
other burnings, the many cruel ones in history,
and especially the ones in the twentieth century.
To my books I add literary magazines.
Listen, people, it’s just my books I’m burning!
From the paper covered with words many ashes remain.
The stove heats up from the pages in flames.
We feel warmer and perhaps closer to spring,
the sun shining, balmy weather, clear skies.
Perhaps, we’ll be forgiven for this fire
by the stern judges whose forgiveness we seek?
Nevertheless, I ask myself, is there an excuse for this,
Will my conscience bother me because of what I have done?
Should one sacrifice in everything for higher things?
Perhaps, friends, freezing in a cold house
is not something one should resist in this way
and burn books, words, sentences, white paper
and get from them black and gray ashes and a little warmth.

The reflective tone is a major element in the success of each word, each line. It is heartbreaking and heartening at the same time, as a portrait of a situation forced upon individuals in many nations, and as a portrait of unflinching honesty.

Djordjevic finds solace in many acts, including a gift from his daughter, but even his solace is diluted and at the same time compounded, in parts of “Herbs From Tibet And The Himalayas” :

Medicinal herbs, wild grasses, out of which green juices
            flow like blood,
stalks of grass we chew or feed our animals,
the grasses of Walt Whitman, the grasses of childhood,
            sea grasses,
the fur of the earth that dug its claws in the soil.
Like the air shifting, light smoke dispersing.
What quivers and thickly sprouts and flourishes in dreams.
So like those we feed our souls with, dreams,
in which we are little stones on the water bottom.

Djordjevic’s rhythms provide a strong scaffolding throughout this powerful, necessary volume. In Oranges and Snow we have an outstanding example of the literary enterprise.

Postscript : I began writing this piece the week that all hope was lost for Borders. I suspect that neighborhood bookstores will benefit from this development. All independent bookstores battle on many fronts, and a book with a cover as appealing as Oranges and Snow is sure to make a difference when staff consider shelf space. I have reviewed too many first-rate collections that deserve better covers, and am always delighted to be a cheerleader for appealing design.

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Born in Dublin, Eavan Boland is the youngest child of a painter and a diplomat. Author of more than a dozen volumes of poetry and nonfiction, she is also a professor and the Director of the Creative Writing Program at Stanford.

Becoming a Woman Poet–A Journey With Two Maps is quirky and personal, and most of it was published in literary journals. “Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one person’s life,” she writes in the preface. Soon after, she delivers Muriel Ruykeyser’s question: “How shall we tell each other of the poet?” This suggests a feminist stance to those familiar with Ruykeyser and helps frame her premise that her exposure to poetry had two maps, one drawn in Ireland, the other drawn in the United States. Both maps are outlined in countless configurations by awareness of herself as daughter, wife, mother, citizen. In compelling ways she restates her belief that “the journey toward being and becoming a poet cannot happen with one set of directions only.” She provides intriguing detail, including the fact that there are questions of credit (authorship( surrounding at least one of her mother’s artworks.

Becoming a Woman Poet is brisk, each indicator of geography reinforcing the urge to break barriers: “In the sense that my life as a poet has been marked by boundaries, this book allows me to unwrite them–moving freely between countries and poems and histories.” “Unwriting” is an apt invention for “the rooms of other women poets,” the chapter that reels off a collection of names, some familiar, some not, “unwriting” an unheralded literary history on both sides of the Atlantic.

Becoming a Woman Poet is also appropriately unconventional in each approach to Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Denise Levertov, and Charlotte Mew, who killed herself using a poison that guaranteed a particularly gruesome death. Mew transgressed, not just because she was a lesbian in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but because she challenged “the false pastorals of Georgian England and the dead sweetness of pre-Modernist, post-Victorian poetry,” in this oddly, unidentified excerpt:

I remember rooms that have had their part
In the steady slowing down of the heart,
The room in Paris, the room at Geneva,
The little damp room with the seaweed smell,
And that ceaseless maddening sound of the tide
Rooms where for good or for ill things died.

Boland discovered Mew in her thirties, in Ireland in the fifties, and her appreciation for Mew was not instant, but expanded over time. It is not lost on Boland that the decade of her own young adulthood needed later transgressions, and she acknowledges that that era was and still is critical to all citizens.

Upheaval is constant, and Boland writes with immediacy of her student days, walking past statues of Parnell and other major participants in Irish history. She paused outside the home of Oscar Wilde’s mother, pondering the life and work of one who took the pen name Speranza and produced poorly-written polemic. Later in this chapter, “Becoming and Irish Poet,” Boland goes back to the eighteenth century, to a piece by young Eiblhin ni Chonaill, in which the writer puts her hand in the blood of her martyred husband. The poem was hijacked to make it palatable to opponents of Home Rule, and was rescued largely by scholar Angela Bourke. Crediting her, Boland also credits Frank O’Connor for his “incantatory” translation. Boland is too fair not to liberally quote and credit men, sometimes different men in different centuries on the same page, so don’t be surprised when she bursts forth Dryden or Lowell.

As someone who has heard Gaelic, here and in Ireland, I was surprised that Boland did not provide some transliteration for a clearer sense of the sound of Irish poetry that weaves in and out of all she has written. As she notes, her younger years away from Ireland kept her from learning the language. I hope this volume stays in print and that future editions will either add that, or be in the form of a paperback with a CD.

Boland’s treatment of writers she names is generally admiring. Edna St. Vincent Millay has been poorly served by two biographers and many critics, and Boland helps correct that without sounding shrill. Her first exposure to Elizabeth Bishop was a poem called “Moose” in an anthology of American poetry she (disappointingly) doesn’t name, that she was sent to review. “I read the first stanza. I read the second and marked the place. later that night, with the children in their cots and the house quiet, I began to read her again.” Bishop’s poplars became “hairy, scratchy things” in New Brunswick, Canada’s woods, and Boland gladly got lost.

It is startling that he misquotes part of Bishop’s famous poem “One Art.” “A joking gesture” is hat Boland supplies, instead of “(the joking voice, a gesture / I love)” set in parentheses in my 1983 edition of the Complete Poems, and on the Academy of American Poets home page. Nor does she mention Bishop’s alcoholism or the fact, so essential here, that she lived in Brazil with a woman who committed suicide. These misdemeanors are the only off notes in an otherwise fine volume, though it is surprising that in her chapter about the correspondence between Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan and the tensions in it, she neglects to mention Levertov’s prose classic The Poet in the World.

The last chapter on this journey is called “Letter to a Young Woman Poet,” and it is powerful and encouraging. On the final page she declares that “women poets, from generation to generation, will be able to befriend one another.” This is old news, made fresh on almost every page. Becoming a Woman Poet is a welcome guide, for women and men who write, or who care about the lettered life, to befriend one another and the literature that sustains them.

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Born in 1939, Stephen Dunn is one of the more consistently satisfying poets of his generation. There is a stately bravery in the way he observes and experiences feeling, and What Goes On—Selected and New Poems, 1995-2009, is a welcome compilation, meaty and well crafted. He doesn’t always declare fresh news, as in his discussion of the virtues of restraint, a tool I believe gets less respect than it should. In ‘’Ars Poetica’’ his questioning and diction make the entire poem stirring, some stanzas especially so :

Yet what could awe us now?
The feeling dies
and then the word.

Restraint. Extravagance. I liked
how one could unshackle the other,
that they might become indivisible.

These lines help define what makes his poetry so rewarding. In his understanding of passion, structure and energy, he can bring to mind what a limber, dedicated ballet dancer does in the task of interpreting material and engaging an audience. “Five Roses in the Morning—March 16, 2003” would be too sweet by half without his self-control :

On the TV the showbiz of war,
so I turn it off
wishing I could turn it off,
and glance at the five white roses
in front of the mirror on the mantle,
looking like ten.
That they were purchased out of love
and are not bloody red
won’t change a goddamned thing—
goddamned things, it seems, multiplying
every day. Last night
the roses numbered six, but she chose
to wear one in her hair,
and she was more beautiful
because she believed she was.
It changed the night a little.
For us, I mean.

Let us now praise a poet who so gracefully realizes that the ordinary, the beautiful, and the dreadful meet well when treated with such finely calibrated attention, and with the utterly appropriate goddamns reminding us that poetry and roses help us cope with “the showbiz of war.” Dunn doesn’t do dazzle, though he duly honors those whose large, obsessive stars have burned brightly, as in “Poe in Margate:”

To come back and learn his alcoholism
was an illness—Poe had to laugh at that.
He knew the vanity of excuses better than anyone,
and how good self-destruction feels when one
is in the act of it. Still, he thought, you must be sober
to write your autobiography, set things straight.

He’d give up all notions of a kingdom by the sea,
to try to see things as they were and are.
But soon came the old, constant rebellion
of the senses and mind, soon he remembered
that truth was an enormous house shrouded in mist
with many secret vaults, and that perfect sobriety

is the state which you make the version of yourself
you like best, just another way to lie. He’d have
just one drink before dinner to ease in the night.

By the end of the poem, we’re back at the typically wise observation that the mad need the rational if art is to be born, and borne, if there is to be a “victory of precision over the loose ends/ of a troubled mind.”

Margate is a Jersey Shore town not far from Richard Stockton College, where Dunn is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing, and in this poem and others, Dunn lets places he has spent time in become fresh settings for old truths. “Henry James at Cape May ” is a concise assessment of James the novelist and James the man, putting to shame countless long-winded essays. He tidily sums up what has been detailed (‘’sit down at the wrong table, attempt to speak French”) by some misguided American :

But was he worrying now that someone who thought
and couldn’t stop thinking may never have loved?
And were we who watched him there watching us
so unfair, so spoiled to regret that one who gave us so
much had also not given us something else

These are important questions to ponder, particularly when Henry James is involved, but they also, naturally, apply to anyone wishing to lead a life that has room for sentiment (as opposed to the sentimental) and for eros, and even for foolishness held back from the brink by the possibility of regret. Again, a Dunn poem works as a kind of compressed, miniaturized “Guide for the Perplexed.”

In “The Mistaken,” he uses an event mundane to the point of trite, and elevates it keenly:

When a sparrow or grackle mistakes my window
for clear passage, often its neck is broken—
no chance for it ever to get smarter.
And the hawk pursuing it has less than a second
to understand that sometimes the world isn’t
what it seems; surely not enough time for wisdom.
Which is why I’m most pleased when they’re stunned
and lie there for awhile, then rise unsteadily,
stand dazed a while longer. They could be us,
or at least those of us with a tendency to mistake
the unforgiving cinderblock of one of our bad ideas
for a pillow. How lovely, though, when they become
themselves again and take to the trees,
as if eager to tell us what they’ve learned.

The piece could stop right here and be called perfection, thanks especially to that ‘’unforgiving cinderblock,” but it continues , doubling in size and doing minor damage by stretching a slimness past the breaking point.

“What Men Want,” is the last poem in the book, and probably the most recent. “After the power to chose/ a man wants the power to erase.” These are the final lines.

Clearly Dunn , now in his seventies, not only wants this, but wants the power to keep his well-earned art from being erased. For reasons that could fill volumes, or a Dunn poem at its best, technology has an increasing influence on the particulars of the survival of the written word. What Goes On deserves a permanent place in what ever form technology continues to deliver lines so thoughtfully gratifying, so well lit and finely formed .

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