Born in 1934 to Italian immigrants, Ceravolo got an engineering degree, served in the Army and wrote ardent, engaged poetry until shortly before his death from a brain tumor in 1988. He studied with Kenneth Koch, and won the first Frank O’Hara Prize for Spring In This World of Poor Mutts. He was always considered something of a “poet’s poet,” appreciated with detailed loyalty by writers who felt hugely grateful to have been introduced to his work. Collected Poems is the banquet with all the courses to validate their enthusiasm.

Koch called a Ceravolo poem “an amazing perceptual archaeology,” and that’s a good place to begin, with its engagement of what one senses (perceives), and also what one must dig for. Ceravolo’s combinations of words, line spacing and the music they make both amaze and stop breath.

“Passion for the Sky,” from the O’Hara Prize volume, gives a brief glimpse of how so much comes together with so little :

It is a flawless love poem, for the person who is loved and for other offerings night holds.

There is an almost relentless urgency in every line, demanding a level of being awake that could be enervating, but miraculously isn’t. With Ceravolo reading becomes both energizing and, more often than not, a time-out to praise, as well as a respite from surroundings. “Dive in!” I want to shout in response to “Inland:”

This poem makes me think of Bruce Springsteen’s “Hungry Heart,” as do other Ceravolo poems, in part because, deliberately avoiding stardom, he lived in mundane Bloomfield, New Jersey, where typical Springsteen fans lead lives of unheralded emotions . Bloomfield is close enough to New York to satisfy many appetites, and Ceravolo was an eager consumer, admiring Ted Berrigan and absorbing the grit and rough beauties that the area had to offer. He was also not completely immune to the lure of surface glitter, and posed for Francesco Scavullo, the lens master best known for glamming up Cosmopolitan Magazine for many years. The Wesleyan staff was wise to use one of Scavullo’s smoldering portraits for the cover of this book, as a way help hook a new generation on a talent that ranks with the best that American letters has to offer.

“End of the World” could be about any place, including the industrial parts of New Jersey not far from where Ceravolo lived and worked :

This is the kind of poem that makes me ache over the fact that Ceravolo is not with us to share a bill with Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Ed Roberson and other living masters. His physicality is ever-present, sometimes with the plain elegance of “Lethal Sonnet:’’

Ceravolo was a man of many parts, laboring to unite a whole and to do it with integrity. Engineering is an occupation that has more room for poetry (think precision, dedication, symmetry, and a lust for questions and answers ) than one might immediately assume. He made room to fall in love, to marry and have children and be attentive to those he loved. He fed his muse in ways that honor the sacred without ever crossing the line into a slackness that bruises the raw holiness he sought, found and celebrated. Sometimes his short poems say it best :

“Vision.”
Sacrifice love and record position
The goats balance
On beautiful mountains.

“Promontory”
At dawn whatever light
returns, my heart
becomes quicker and quicker
in the night.

He was also wounded by events beyond his control, taking them in as if they were his own, as if suffering for them could somehow heal individuals ripped apart by the decisions of others. “Lament #2 for Lebanon” is too long to quote in full, but like almost everything in this collection, shows bravery, balance, and pure art:

Tomorrow night before the winds blow down
the hungry trees : they’re swaying in the mist,
I want to stop this grove from filling.
Stars in our sleep ride the massacre
in corners of destruction’s nest.
Suns of chords
like dialysis or death.
unknown
Oh Lebanon
land of wood,
defoliated dreams, decapitated screams.
land of wood
Like a pawn you lie
in the middle of the beast,
in the midst of an
old land of sorrows
of controversy crossing the soul.
A dark walk in the desert!
A scorched memory’s toll!

The entire piece is about twice what you see here, and is, like every word in this volume, (including David Lehman’s rigorously appreciative introduction) a “scorched memory” and well worth the price, the toll of time spent with this incendiary material.

Related Posts:

• Bright Wings An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds edited by Billy Collins
• The Emily Dickinson Reader by Paul Legault
• Inside/Out: Selected Poems by Marilyn Buck
• Poets Beyond the Barricade by Dale M Smith
• “My Poets” by Maureen McLane

Billy Collins is a former United States Poet Laureate, and while I recommend this book for its visual and lyrical delights, it contains some dismaying omissions . The title, from “God’s Grandeur” by Gerard Manley Hopkins, should be familiar to anyone who made it through high school English, and Collins says nothing about why he chose it. Collins also says little about the reasoning behind most of his selections, so it is a mystery why Bright Wings contains two pieces by the consistently excellent Jane Hirshfield, two by the late Amy Clampitt, whose work is worthy of wider attention, and none by former United States Poet Laureates Robert Hayden and Rita Dove, or any other prominent writer of color. Hayden’s “A Plague of Starlings” came quickly to mind for its unflinching originality, and was easy to find in his Collected Poems. Wanda Coleman has written a riveting piece about the California Condor, and Camille Dungy and Ethelbert Miller have written better poems about birds than some of what Bright Wings contains. All three have won awards. It’s also odd that Collins would not make room for “Epitaph for a Bird” by Spain’s immortal Lorca.

Collins says he wants “to give the reader a better chance of being taken by surprise,” and he surprised me by repeating Auden’s quote that “poetry makes nothing happen.” Those words were overexposed to the point of cliché in 82’, when I made the mistake of using it them an essay, and Collins says it caused “people to repeat that line to excess.”

His quest for surprise is noted after the “fresh approach” he claims to take by showcasing so many living poets. Linda Pastan admits to confusing Morning Dove with Mourning Dove, and credits the legendary field guide author Roger Tory Peterson with setting her straight. The following passage and the whole poem make me yawn:

But when the book said
Mourning Doves instead
I noticed their ash-gray feathers,
like shadows
on the underside
of love.

Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney. Pulitzer Prize winner Mary Oliver. And Kay Ryan and Chaucer and Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, Thomas Hardy and Thoreau. All excellent poets with well deserved places in the canon, and fine examples of their work is in this collection. There’s also a sluggish piece by John Ciardi, best known as an influential editor in my grandfather’s day. Collins’ approach is less fresh than puzzling, given what he says he wants to achieve.

These serious irritations aside, Bright Wings has plenty of poems that provide pleasure and sustenance. Timothy Steele, one of the best of the “new formalists” has perfect pitch in “Black Phoebe” :

Her swoops are short and low and don’t aspire
To more, is seems, than nature’s common strife.
Perching, she strops her bill upon a wire
As though she’d barbered in a former life.
When the wire rocks. She quickly slips her tail
A few times, and her balance doesn’t fail.

If she display an unassuming pride-
Compact, black-capped, black breast puffed to the sun-
The sentiment perhaps is justified :
Mosquitoes, gnats, and flies would overrun
Much of the planet within several years
But for her and her insectivorous peers.

Not prone, as are the jays, to talking trash,
She offers quieter companionship;
On summers days, when starlings flap and splash
And make the birdbath overspill and drip
Or empty out its basin altogether,
She seeks the shade and waits for cooler weather.

Lisa Williams has two fine poems that more than hold their own. “Grackles” is gently kinetic and wise, with a spiritual whiff, as in “one body, ” “some order” and the “gray air” of a “Sunday” :

They were not one body. Yet they seemed
held together by some order, their thick necks
flickering with a blue-black iridescence,
their yellow-circled pupils bright and cold.

In a wave of differences that passed
low over the surface of my yard,
they picked it clean of morning’s fritillaries
and other summer gestures fall discards

then settled on the hill behind the fence
for several teeming minutes to remark
its tapestry, each razored beak, each tail
parting Sunday’s gray air like a spear.

I could tell you they gathered up
the darkness of my winter thought that day
in mid-September, bundled it, black-ribboned,
into sleek coats and lifted it from me

just as you have imagined. But this
would be a lie. I watched them comb the fields
with interest, and, when their beak’s clicks had died,
turned back to what I was.

The emotionally tortured Delmore Schwartz, who died much too soon, achieved heartbreaking perfection with ‘The Ballet of the Fifth Year.” It is illustrated by three gulls in flight—an ordinary scene made exalting in execution that does justice to the words without overwhelming them. From beginning to end, the poem honors that sacred place where artistic gift meets craft and memory:

Where the sea gulls sleep, or indeed where they fly
Is a place of different traffic. Although I
Consider the fishing bay (where I see them dip and curve
And purely glide) a place that weakens the nerve
Of will, and closes my eyes, as they should not be
(They should burn like the street- light all night quietly,
So that whatever is present will be known to me),
Nevertheless the gulls and the imagination
Of where they sleep, which comes to creation
In strict shape and color, from their dallying
Their wings slowly, and suddenly rallying
Over, up, down the arabesque of descent,
Is an old act enacted, by fabulous intent
When I skated, afraid of policemen, five years old,
In the winter sunset, sorrowful and cold,
Hardly attained to thought, but old enough to know
Such grace, so self-contained, was the best escape to know.

Every anthology comes with limitations. Publishers often cannot afford to make them as large as compilers would wish, and most people actively engaged with poetry will hope for more, or for different selections in any collection. Good, safe anthologies like this one should also encourage readers to seek out more material about birds and words, of many colors, from many continents and cultures.

Related Posts:

• Collected Poems by Joseph Ceravolo
• The Emily Dickinson Reader by Paul Legault
• Inside/Out: Selected Poems by Marilyn Buck
• Poets Beyond the Barricade by Dale M Smith
• “My Poets” by Maureen McLane

The good news is that The Emily Dickinson Reader, Paul Legault’s English-to-English Translation of Emily Dickinson’s Complete Poems, is plenty complicated, rarely messy and always a musical, visual and tactile delight. Someday, graduate students will write theses about the way McSweeney’s designers work with its authors and with text, and will also discuss the financing that enables, in this case, gold-tipped pages, endpapers with in-joke images about Dickinson’s botanical interests, and ribbon place-markers usually reserved for prayer books. I have heard librarians (don’t ask me to name individuals or institutions) grouse about shelving oddly sized McSweeney’s books, adding that the books are gorgeous, while holding them tenderly.

Dickinson, over the years, has become as much a physical object–with prim hairstyle and high necked dress–as a poetic innovator who flipped the bird to conventional grammar and punctuation. She opened floodgates for imitators who couldn’t be bothered with understanding the formalities of verse she was steeped in before she broke away. The physical package of The Emily Dickinson Reader is about as good as it gets. Every word in this book stands alone, but every design decision supports it or elevates it. I believe it is risky to speak for the dead, but I also believe that Emily Dickinson, William Blake, Walt Whitman and other earlier poets would have as much serious fun as I am with this enchanting book that doesn’t flinch from the poet’s weirdness, pettiness or fantasies of transgression. Or adorations and vexations.

Emily Dickinson had a huge, rich, intricately subversive interior and that has a lot to do with her appeal. For younger readers, her work can initially feel appropriately, approachably adolescent, with enticing hints of what is to come. As one ages and keeps reading her, the work becomes increasingly adult, daring and complex, because the reader has grown into the poet. Legault’s treatment is brisk, cogent, fearlessly nourishing and should age well with readers of varying (or no) exposure to Dickinson and her milieu. It should also-it goes without saying- encourage more interest in Dickenson’s poems, with or without this volume nearby.

Dickinson’s poetry was very compact for the nineteenth century, and Legault takes the compactness to another level. Here is Dickinson in “’Faith’ is fine invention”:

“Faith” is fine invention
For gentlemen who see!
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency.

Here’s Legault’s translation:

Science has more practical uses than religion.

All the lines, hers and his, are inextricably entwined with social, religious and scientific issues of the day. When Dickinson was writing, science was exploding and challenging the New England religiosity of her universe, and she knew it and welcomed it even when she found it a bit intimidating. In 2013 we have climate-driven storms that give us Emergencies we could have avoided had we been more prudent in our attention to science. The concentric expansions never really quit, which is a major element of the magic.

Legault hears her Dickinson, strokes her, invites you in. He does it with most of the 212 pages, and he’s morbidly amusing when Dickinson fondles the dead.

Zombies are similar to robots.

That’s his response-translation to a poem called “How many times these low feet have staggered,” a piece with (I feel pinned to these image) a “soldered mouth,” an “awful rivet,” and other allusions to the industrial age that has encased a dead “Indolent Housewife.” He’s pretty cheeky. Except he isn’t. And he can be plenty snarky, which is just fine, because the very word “snark” is made for Dickinson, as “All published poets are whores, ” is Legault’s version of a Dickinson piece that begins:

Publication –is the Auction
Of the mind of Man-
Poverty be justifying
For so foul a thing

Possibly- but We – would rather
From Our Garret go
White-unto the White Creator-
That invest-Pure Snow.

Take THAT, AWP!!! Rot in Sodom and Gomorrah, Poets & Writers, and PEN and every other bureaucracy that helps authors, but did not exist in the nineteenth century. This is an example of the dilemma faced by everyone who cares about vocation, their own or others’. Dickinson was pure without being artistically priggish, and that freed her to confront without giving a blink, the confines of current syntax or feelings not yet tried, or considered beyond morality or less than morality, as in her desire for Sue, her sister-in-law.

On the subject of Emily and Sue, Legault makes it hard to keep a straight face. Pun intended. No apologies. He is laugh-out-loud funny with the comic, flip-side of pain, and use of the beloved’s name:

I like to watch people sleeping ( a little too much).
Here’s looking at you, Sue.

And:

I would be happier if people like Sue would stop

stopping loving me.

And:

Your name is shiny, Sue.

And the heartbreaking:

I like to eat things that are inedible. Like Sue.

Really. This stuff could be the inhabiting, zombified (zombie is a favorite Legault noun), limbo where Dickinson’s pen wept slivers of broken glass, but also sang ecstatically, waiting for the world to catch up.

The The Emily Dickinson Reader is a fabulous love letter to Dickenson. And so to all of us.

Related Posts:

• Collected Poems by Joseph Ceravolo
• Bright Wings An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds edited by Billy Collins
• Inside/Out: Selected Poems by Marilyn Buck
• Poets Beyond the Barricade by Dale M Smith
• “My Poets” by Maureen McLane

Marilyn Buck was the daughter of a white Austin, Texas clergyman and she came of age in the combustible sixties. Imprisoned for procuring arms for the Black Liberation Army, her initial sentence was increased after she escaped, went underground and was captured. She lived out a real-life drama that ended two and a half years ago, when cancer killed her not long after she was released. Among the many complexities that must be taken into account when discussing her story, are beliefs about social justice that led to her actions, and the suffering of men and women outside the walls, and the women she lived with.

Thanks to New College, Buck studied for a degree in poetics under David Meltzer, who provides a passionate introduction to these poems and shares what it was like to work with her, as a correspondent and as a visitor. It is not until the acknowledgements at the end of Inside/Out: Selected Poems, written by Buck, that we learn she “wasn’t much of a poetry lover until I ran smack dab into Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, June Jordan and Alice Walker in the 1960s. The power of these Black women and other audacious, determined, liberation-minded women made the poetic real: the spirit, the passion, the word.” She also read Blake, and it shows in admirable ways.

Sometimes that influence is too apparent, raising the question of how this work should be judged. And then the question falls away with the reminder that the writer spent half her life in prison, giving every deeply engaged word an intricately charged backstory.

The day-to-day tedium of her life and that of her fellow prisoners is well illustrated, but what is wonderfully jarring is her constant flash of refusal to be cowed, and her inner insistence to stay tender and allow pleasure. In “Woman With a Cat and Iris” she writes :

three purple iris
poised among crystal dew
morning- blurred sun
back drops black birds
flickering across day canvas
raucous as they sip
from glistening blades
Mustafah, gray tomcat sits
regal beggar awaiting
free-fall breakfast
and I a prisoner, luxuriate
wealthy in morning light
wrapped in this anywhere world tableau
guards’ voices clang
the last drops of bitter coffee
nudge my lips into resolution
Mustafa flees
Sunday becomes prison.

She never loses indignation over what is going on outside. Trying to date the piece that follows makes me wish all her poems were dated so that one could get a more precise sense of how her accomplishments were knitted into what her limited resources exposed her to. “Air Nike Slam Dunk,” quoted in its entirety, is one of many reminders that her suffering served her, and now serves readers, as a constant call to connect to the situations of others :

Vietnamese women
forced to work
65 hours per week
for ten dollars
no time for
basketball games

Meltzer and New College, well known for progressive involvement, were the right fit, and Buck’s more personal statements about prison routine, while adding weight to the significance of this book, are unnervingly affecting even when not as well written. “Night Showers” feels like almost any workshop poem, with its first person narrative and flat presentation:

fifteen years ago
I bathed in morning’s anticipation
now, after the sun drops
over the edge of the world
I hasten into showers
where water falls from walls
etched by prisoners’ tears and curses
into safety I slide
fugitive from the State’s eyes
alone
anointed
memory washes
the sorrow-drenched day
my spirit swirls tomorrow
into its eye
flings disappointment
down the well of yesterday.

Note that I said “almost.” While “down the well of yesterday” is as hackneyed as “memory washes the sorrow-drenched day,” the lines that precede the missteps add a powerful punch, especially the image of prisoners’ curses and tears. There, Buck goes outside the shower and nothing can cleanse her, or the reader, of the unjustified filth prisoners live in. And when she puns in “Delirium III,” the word “mettle” becomes an appropriate sub for “metal,” effectively becoming a billy club in ink :

Silence is golden
shut up
listen to the clang of its mettle.

That’s the whole poem, a ringing, resonant artifact .

“No Love Poem,” the next to last piece in Inside/Out, is, like so many in this collection, a cry to be understood, mouth wide open, toward people who have never been in prison.

I wake, eyes open to what must
be a new day, creeping across the dark
I turn to the wall to the emptiness no
lover fills my eyes
across a narrow passage, only a reach away
rising from the fading shades,
yellow interior shadows
white-blanketed shapes, two bunked
one above the other
they too, lie, waiting to open eyes
against all desire
to their own empty beds.

Hayden Carruth, who valued religion much less than I do, compared fine poetry to prayer. The comparison isn’t new, and though it is unclear from Buck’s writing what place organized religion had for her after she left home, these pages contain prayers, answers, wise and generous gifts.

Related Posts:

• Collected Poems by Joseph Ceravolo
• Bright Wings An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds edited by Billy Collins
• The Emily Dickinson Reader by Paul Legault
• Poets Beyond the Barricade by Dale M Smith
• “My Poets” by Maureen McLane

In his introduction, Dale Smith lets us know that he will discuss Levertov, and though he slights her relationship with religion, and with Thomas Merton, his treatment of her correspondence with Robert Duncan is masterful, and honest in a way that many men were not when Levertov and Duncan were sorting out how they should grapple with issues of war and peace and personal and public expression.

Smith believes that “From Vietnam to more recent wars in the Middle East, poetry invites us to renew public perspectives on institutional legitimacy, disciplinary practice and citizenship.” Every word in that sentence can and should be used to support other means of communication available at a given time, and Smith’s book rightly includes use of the WEB, the enormous response to Poets Against The War and the administration of George W. Bush.

Dale Smith teaches at Ryerson University in Toronto, and though this book has its share of academic jargon, it has so much more of what is necessary for engaged living that jargon is usually overcome by passionate involvement with the subject. He begins with Charles Olson’s poetry and prose protests against historical architectural negation in Gloucester, the Massachusetts fishing town he called home. Buildings he loved and believed held important meanings for the common good of the local future, were razed. But thanks to an editor who shared his devotion, urgent issues were brought up, and the documentary record provides a fine example of commitment by someone with roots in a particular place. Olson’s efforts prove heartbreaking and heartening at the same time.

Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan had a friendship each treasured, and each demanded a great deal of the other. The demands were part of their particular natures, and respect and affection kept the friendship and correspondence going long after weaker spirits might have called it quits. The war in Vietnam was agony for Levertov, as this passage Smith quotes, and so much of her poetry make clear : “I have found myself a poet, long before this particular involvement, saying things in poems which I think have moral implications. I think that if one is an articulate person, who makes certain statements, one has an obligation as a human being to back them up with one’s actions.” Duncan had problems with it this, that never went away. “We are not reacting to the war,” he wrote to Levertov in 1966, “but mining images here that the war arouses in us.” He was wrong in her case, as Smith’s examples from her collection, To Stay Alive make clear. Again Smith examines dissent and we are informed that Duncan did not waver as the war went on. Nor did he seem willing to face his not-so-veiled sexism, and jealousy at Levertov’s growing fame. That Smith does not flinch from this is another reason to praise Poets Beyond the Barricade, and the fact that Duncan and Levertov eventually ended their friendship comes as no surprise.

Smith’s treatment of Lorenzo Thomas and Ed Dorn in one chapter is another fascinating look at tensions and complexities in public-private creativity. Thomas’ relationship to visual arts—most notably painting and photo-journalism–are especially compelling when noted alongside his belief that “All poetry is incomplete until it is read aloud.” We have in Thomas a generous, original writer, allowing the infamous photo of teenagers being fire hosed in Birmingham to be used as the title page of his book The Bathers, indicating the vicious bath his subjects were exposed to. Smith cites an excellent example from the collection :

We turned to fire when the water hit
Us. Something
Berserk regained
An outmoded regard for sanity
While in the fire station
No one thought of flame.

“The understatement of these lines lends tremendous force to the voice reconstructing a narrative of baptism,” Smith writes, and baptism is especially apt because of its connections to innocence in general and the innocence of the youth in the poem. Baptism changes everything, and Americans and people everywhere were irreversibly changed after witnessing that event in the media.

“Like Thomas,” Smith says, “Edward Dorn often addressed the conflicting public interests of American democracy with a rhetorical poetics immersed in the practices of the historical avant-garde.” Dorn’s brilliantly shocking poem about the Chinese method of paying for execution ends with a swift, rhetorical slice:

It’s a good thing Reagan
didn’t know about this practice.
He’d have considered it tax relief.

And then we get to Poets Against the War, the huge support the Web site generated, and the indisputable notice that seems quaint just a few years after the Bush administration’s illegally conducted, immoral war. It’s not easy to go over material so bound to recent history, and to make it seem fresh. Smith does it in his final lines before the Afterword, just after exploring the work of Kent Johnson, a gifted satiric poet in the Midwest, who, God bless him! is mad as hell. “I’m going to box your ears,” Johnson says, and it’s a vivid to demand we get out of our poetic boxes, as so many admirable literary forebears have done. Using Johnson is one of the many reasons this chapter and this book are so effective and affecting, and why, though I am not fond of bellicose imagery, this book is ready for the ring.

Related Posts:

• Collected Poems by Joseph Ceravolo
• Bright Wings An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds edited by Billy Collins
• The Emily Dickinson Reader by Paul Legault
• Inside/Out: Selected Poems by Marilyn Buck
• “My Poets” by Maureen McLane

McLane brings to My Poets a rigorous education from Harvard and Oxford, large quantities of curiosity, courage, raw emotion and a welcome concern for effects on others of her complicated predicaments. These predicaments were made more difficult by her realization that when she was about to marry a kind, smart man who appreciated her, she fell in love with a woman. She is to be praised for decency, interpersonal ethics and for glorious associations in this incoherent book.

The book is partially categorized as Poets, American-Biography, Poetry-Influence. Poetry-History and Criticism. McLane is not the first person of letters to create a piece that is not easy to pigeonhole, but this one disappoints, though a writer who feels the magnet pull of the words “spatchcocked” and “kankedort” should be wished well, cheered on, despite the “buts” I’ll discuss.

Her treatment of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell says nothing new. Bishop’s alcoholism, lesbianism, reticence, modest output, often flawless technique. Check. Lowell’s manias. Check. What’s more troubling about McLane’s material on Bishop is that though she mentions having studied with Helen Vendler at Harvard, she says nothing about Vendler’s outrage at publication of the Bishop volume from which she, McLane, quotes. That volume came after Bishop’s death, and contains poems Vendler carefully examined, making an excellent case for their exclusion, an exclusion supported by Bishop’s refusal to publish them in her lifetime. This was a brouhaha worth acknowledging, and worth examination by committed readers of poetry.

McLane’s musings on Gertrude Stein are more satisfying, as are those on H. D. Both are women whose seriousness is too often mocked and who hold up to a strong magnifying glass. McLane understands that they lived and wrote boldly, that their crafts were groundbreaking gifts of lasting value. And then we get to (former U. S. Poet Laureate) Louise Gluck.

McLane read Gluck in great need, announcing, “Louise Gluck’s Wild Iris was a companion more intimate than any living friend, a murmur and a rasp and balm in the mind those months the structures of living you yourself had erected were now collapsing, the foundations battered by your yourself. Your depression was florid, ardent, a sick fever of desired annihilation when any flicker of energy served only to fuel and intensify despair.” Note the second person, which comes and goes throughout this book. Note also a valid gratitude for Gluck’s lines such as

Hear me out : That which you call death
I remember.
Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.
It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.

This is the title poem in Gluck’s volume and one of many examples mirroring McLane’s agonies while illustrating fine taste. So its irritating when suddenly, a few pages later McLane, again in the second person, is sitting in “one of Hyde Park’s landmark bookstores,” leafing through Gluck’s Proofs and Theories : Essays on Poetry, admiring “the exacting account of the education; the anorexia, the analysis, the maniacal protective ecstasies of refusal and then refusing refusal,” when a famous novelist arrives, comments on what she’s reading , and “unspools how she married for this and divorced for that and how the long-ago affair for this one blew up.“ I’m not above gossip, even the salacious sort, though as salacious goes, this is pretty mild. It’s also a tease because she doesn’t name the novelist. I’ve pondered why it’s here and come up empty.

Moving right along, McLane’s look at Fanny Howe correctly places her rigorous, melodic and profoundly, questingly American work as among the very best of an era. Howe is less accessible than many predecessors, but no less necessary and rewarding. She is, McLane declares, “an American singer of the singular, contradictory song.” Then we get “An Interlude In the Form of a Cento,” which is fun, with convincing, admiring nods to, among others, Gluck, Alice Notley, Elizabeth Alexander, Denise Levertov, William Blake and Anne Carson. But again, I am disappointed, wishing for more poets of color. C.S. Giscombe, former U. S Poet Laureate Robert Hayden, and Gwendolyn Brooks come quickly to mind.

And so (apologies Kurt Vonnegut) it goes, with some welcome, concentrated dazzle toward the end when McLane delves into Emily Dickinson. McLane has little to add here, which is not a misdemeanor, largely because she highlights the neglected Susan Howe, whose treatment of Dickinson is a classic. This is the kind of “femmage” Muriel Rukeyser and others of that generation would surely have welcomed as much as I do. I also believe they would have wished for much more material in “My Romantics,” though it is always gratifying to be reminded how far Wordsworth and Shelley were prepared to go, and how international political upheavals and inner turmoil affected what they penned.

“And certainly Shelley was keen to fuse psychological and sexual with political aspirations, and he was insufficiently mindful that political commitments might well channel non-or pre-political needs.” This sentence is hugely resonant, displaying McLane at her best.

Frederick Seidel. Rae Dalven’s Cavafy translation. August Kleinzahler. Paul Muldoon (who has published McLane in The New Yorker), Seamus Heaney , and Marianne Moore, who receives worthy treatment in these pages. Frederick Seidel is a gilded, glittery acrobat with substance beneath each surface, and McLane surely knows how to elaborate on his gifts. She doesn’t. Nor does she with Dalven’s Cavafy , groundbreaking in its day, with a superb preface by Auden. Mc Lane just lists and lists sometimes, leaving me breathlessly vexed and unsatisfied by this quivering, sometimes brilliant book.

Related Posts:

• Collected Poems by Joseph Ceravolo
• Bright Wings An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds edited by Billy Collins
• The Emily Dickinson Reader by Paul Legault
• Inside/Out: Selected Poems by Marilyn Buck
• Poets Beyond the Barricade by Dale M Smith

Years ago I decided to do as much holiday shopping as possible at independent book stores and non-profit retail outlets. Living in San Francisco makes this easy, with destinations like City Lights, Green Apple and the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library bookstore, not to mention the 826 Valencia space and many museum shops.

The Friends bookstore is more than a cheap fix for the paperback novel you devoured as an eBook and want to wrap and share with someone you love. It’s also a trove of collectibles, and like Powell’s in Portland, Oregon and Daedalus, the massive remainder house, it has an Internet presence and a devoted staff . My best staff story concerns Tattered Cover in Denver, where a patient woman tracked down a new, cheerfully illustrated cloth edition of A Child’s Garden of Verses, in Spanish, for a bi-lingual baby on my list.

Indie Bound, a national organization of independent booksellers is a tremendous resource, and its Web site provides a store locator and the reminder that for every $100 spent at a local shop, $68 stays in your community. Spend the same amount at a chain or a behemoth online business, and twenty dollars less comes back to the population that needs it. In other words, Amazon is a lot less necessary than many people believe.

Here are some of my current favorite contemporary poetry volumes. Some were published before 2012, but all are immensely rewarding.

First things first. The Fourth Edition of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. This belongs on the dest of anyone teaching creative writing or literature, and anyone over the age of twelve who is serious about poetry.

McSweeney’s has just inaugurated a poetry series, and is off to a splendid start. Love, An Index by Rebecca Lindenberg and Fragile Acts, by Allan Peterson, are first-rate, with covers so stunning you might want to slipcase them in plexiglass and leave them on a coffee table between reads.

With major help from Gary Snyder (all of whose books are worth owning) Lew Welch’s poems have been collected in Ring of Bone and published by City Lights Books. A Beat legend who disappeared, never to be found, Welch did almost everything at full throttle. One’s excesses can overshadow fine work, and this was too often the case with Welch. Snyder serves him well.

Anthologies make special gifts because there is a heightened pleasure in exposing someone to a variety of poetry. Black Nature–Four centuries of African-American Nature Poetry, was edited by award-winning poet (and Rumpus Poetry Book Club Board Member) Camille Dungy. This superb collection is packed with compelling images felt deeply and described with finesse. It also has essays by Dungy, Ed Roberson and others. Published in 2009, I have no doubt it will last.

The Best American Poetry 2012 is another keeper. David Lehman is the series editor and Mark Doty is the guest editor this year. Doty is disarmingly honest in his introduction, announcing “This book might well be called Seventy-five Poems Mark Likes, but who’d buy that? And ‘likes’ is too slight—believes in ? wishes to keep, to dwell within? Its plain that I favor a certain richness of language, a considered relation between restraint and gorgeousness.” The poems he’s selected have that, and though many come from such establishment publications as The New Yorker ( Stephen Dunn, Heather Chrystle and others); Threepenny Review (Kay Ryan and Robert Pinsky, both former U. S Poet Laureates ); The New England Review ( U. S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey) the writers here take the familiar and make it jittery and new.

Gerard Manley Hopkins will always own “kingfisher,” and Wordsworth will always own ‘daffodil,’ which makes using those words very risky. Angelo Nikolopoulos’ “Daffodil” “makes me wanna dance,” while invoking a sweet memory of my grandfather, a high school English teacher, reciting Wordsworth as we walked in among the daffodils in the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. Aloud on a wintry night, this could lead to interesting dreams and conversations in lush settings, with or without the epigraph Nikolopoulos supplies :

A poet could not but be gay

–William Wordsworth

Don’t you know, sweetheart,
less is more?
Giving yourself away
so quickly
with your eager trumpet—
April’s rentboy
in your flock of clones,
unreasonably cheerful, cellulose,
as yellow as a crow’s foot—please.
I don’t get you.
Maybe it’s me,
always loving what I can’t have,
the bulb refusing itself,
perennial challenge.
I’d rather have mulch
than three blithe sepals from you.
I’ve never learned
how to handle kindness
from strangers.

It goes on, ending perfectly by declaring : “I’ve bloomed like you before.”

Jennifer Chang, in a piece called “Dorothy Wordsworth” that was first published in The Nation also has welcome, surprising thoughts about daffodils :

The daffodils can go fuck themselves/
I’m tired of their crowds, yellow rantings
about the spastic sun that shines and shines
and shines. How are they any different
from me? I, too, have a messy head
on a fragile stalk. I spin with the wind.
I flower and don’t apologize. There’s nothing
funny about good weather. Oh, spring again.
There’s more, and the last lines are convincing and huge :
All the boys are in the field gnawing raw
bones of ambition and calling it ardor. Who
the hell are they? This is a poem about war.

All the poets in The Best American Poetry 2012 add some prose about their process, and all are nourishing, with Dean Rader’s contribution and a few others especially so. In discussing “Self-Portrait as Dido to Aeneas” he points out that “Here I was interested in the connection between and among couplets, couple and coupling. And I was thinking about how long love (and loss) lasts.” The Best American Poetry 2012 is a collection that leads to fresh ways of engaging with the success of its contents.

Related Posts:

• Collected Poems by Joseph Ceravolo
• Bright Wings An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds edited by Billy Collins
• The Emily Dickinson Reader by Paul Legault
• Inside/Out: Selected Poems by Marilyn Buck
• Poets Beyond the Barricade by Dale M Smith

Christle was born in 1980 and has two earlier books and a Believer Award to her name, as well as poems in Verse, Columbia Poetry Review, Boston Review, The New Yorker, and publications Rumpus readers may not have heard of and should get to know better. Her New Yorker poem, a finely-wrought, fascinating, emotionally magnetic piece called BASIC, is in What Is Amazing and was selected for the 2012 edition of The Best American Poetry.

There is nothing static, relaxed or dull in any of the poems in this book, so don’t come here if you’re in the mood for gentle reverie or immature, superficial awe. Come instead to work that lives up to the title of the book, making all the senses more alive. HOW LIKE AN ISLAND is both a visual exploration and a love poem exuding wisdom from every pore :

How like an island we are in love encouraging
moss & like an island we are barely moving Just
to exist takes much concentration & like an island
in love we have a house in our two imaginations &
they intersect It strengthens the house & our feelings
Unlike an island we wake up An island never sleeps
That is its duty & ours to remain in love barely moving
We do not want to disturb the house Do not want it
to fall into the ocean that is always so nearby It surrounds
us & is moving Like an island the ocean does not see us
or care why though we persist in loving it at one rate
or another & are waking close together in the dark

Her grammar and punctuation feel spontaneous but of course they are not. They work just right with her words, and there is a tender urgency and respect for what surrounds her and who is beside her. Not every poem is as completely successful, but all succeed in varied ways and are likely to make their way into even more fine fabric of American letters.

“Parking Lot” is beautiful and flawless, healing and wounding :

Light breaks and its edges are sharp
O face wound bleeding profusely!
O pressure applied by the quick-thinking cloud!
If a man approach and beseech thee
speaking in voluble cursive :
What is the world and where am I?
tell him
You are the ruined thing
and the world is what loves to repair you

It’s the kind of piece I like to see closer to the end of a volume because it is such a gracious, hopeful summing-up. But I will take it where I can get it and enjoy the music that reminds me of (former U. S. Poet Laureate) Charles Simic and others who aren’t afraid to go big and intense with punctuation and questions. Christle’s approach to nature can also be compared to the under-appreciated (I’ve said it here before and deliberately say it again) Ed Roberson, making me think the two of them plus Simic would make a intriguing panel on the topic of nature, exuberance and fear in poetry.

“Last Time I Wore This Sweater” makes me wish (I confess to wishing this frequently when reading the writers I’ve mentioned and many others) that glossy magazines like Outside and Smithsonian published verse :

That morning when weather erased the mountain
and I kept talking into the white like an American
and could see nothing I then rubbed the feeling
that all the data I had collected (the white) (the
mountain) (the talking) was draining away through
this vast and new hole with which I coincided

I will feel seriously stupid if the lack of punctuation at the end is a misprint, because “coincided” is perfectly open-ended. A lot of data can be collected in a white cloud erasing a mountain and not all of that data needs to be named all the time. This piece is an excellent instance of judicious restraint. It is often considered poor form for a teacher to use one’s own writing as a tool for instruction, but Christle , who has taught at Emory and U Mass, Amherst, ought to get away with it at her next gig.

“A Long Life,” with the exception of the word “wonderful,” which feels jarringly easy, is deceptively simple and rightly connected to the basics of living honorably:

It was like this,
We regarded the animals,
could not help but do so.
And light
which shapes wonderful colors
hurt our eyes.
They were too pale.
When two events
occurred at once
It made everyone laugh.
Happiness
I think we called it.
The air was full
of silver.
At night we kept out the cold.
A long life
lived slowly
in the company
of all our mistakes.
And how sometimes
in the evening
I’d cut what hair
you’d lately grown.

The conversational rhythms backed by hard and soft vowels and consonants provide another display of a package with everything to make this composition valuable, as in an object with (not too much) heft and hints of the timeless. Again, judicious restraint. Jane Hirshfield fans, take note. Aspiring poets, read this (and everything else in What Is Amazing) aloud and examine its soundworks. Then close your eyes and see the composition. It’s an exercise in multidimensional pleasure.

“Being judged too earnest about his subjects would bother him less than being too detached from them.” That’s from a Wall Street Journal piece by Richard B. Woodward, about photographer Robert Adams, who is 75 and taught English literature at Colorado College before devoting himself full-time to photography. I consider that line a “found poem,” discovered the week I was working on this essay. Like Adams, Heather Christle is a tenderly rigorous witness. What Is Amazing provides hope for a similarly distinguished career.

Related Posts:

• Collected Poems by Joseph Ceravolo
• Bright Wings An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds edited by Billy Collins
• The Emily Dickinson Reader by Paul Legault
• Inside/Out: Selected Poems by Marilyn Buck
• Poets Beyond the Barricade by Dale M Smith

Most publishers would not inspire a “digression” in a lead to a review, but these attributes are scaffolding for anything one should say about the whole McSweeney’s venture as an example of the citizenship of “the realm of the senses.’’ This is especially the case with Fragile Acts, because the poetry is so soul-poppingly magnetic.

Peterson studied painting at the Rhode Island School of design, and taught in Florida for many years. His poems have appeared in the Nation, Boston Review, and many other publications. Ireland’s brave, well-respected Salmon Press, published his third book, As Much As. Anonymous Or and All the Lavish In Common, his earlier volumes of poetry, won prizes. So it’s curious to have a blurb from Laura Kasischke refer to Peterson as “an exciting new voice.” Lewis Lapham is on the mark when calling this book “a joy to read,” John Ashbery describes it as “a major find, ” and it’s a pleasure to reinforce their enthusiasm and to remind readers that this book is a Rumpus Poetry Book Club selection.

“Out of the Whole Azalea,” quoted in full, is a shimmer of associations, alchemically coherent :

Out of the whole azalea one branch quivers
and there is the lizard.
Blue jays scream rat snake for everyone
because tree bark has moved.
I am watching for sand wasps hunting for females
when a leaf on its elbow
lies down, and a snake in the form
of a little river pours itself out from the litter.
It does not see me. Just as well. We are to be avoided.
We are listed in their books with the vicious.
They are merely poisonous to live.
Before the shot, anticipation, after it the wasteful inequity.
Hunters are those for whom this is guiltless.
One slat irregular in the laddered blind, and there
the blazing eye of the neighbor.

Amateurs, please don’t try this. It succeeds because of balance of anticipation, apprehension, and mix of literal and not-so-literal color. Peterson ‘s unflagging attention makes demands to absorb freshness, a new way of apprehending. “Down in the Distance” does it again, with similarly sparkle, that, by the last two words, brings the reader to what the first words suggest, the Biblical intensity of “the still small voice” :

I am trying to go small and listen to the cells
synthesizing my glittering belongings
and acknowledge the red words in the text :
hemoglobin, oxygen, radium from pitchblende.
We do not need dynamos and heavy equipment.
Look at what is accomplished by just the moderate
heat of a body. We can see farther than we can hear,
love longer than we last. Our engines are monuments
to how we are missing the boat, even though the boat
is a sidetrack like mixing our metaphors that sink.
Down in the distance the enzymes catalyze glucose
to pyruvate, little snaps like cracking your knuckles.
My right hand reaches for yours. Blood parses water.
I am relying on minute uncertainties. I am answering
the atmosphere as if it spoke like voices from oxidation,
infection, a burning bush.

Sometimes it’s imperative to be unsubtle, as in those last words, but it takes a subtle ear to know it. “Pitchblende,” higher up, is an especially resonant noun because with that last e, the syllable is extended, much the way pitchblende itself, used to make uranium (and we all know what THAT’S for) is fraught with unstable motion. “God said fire, not a flood next time,” goes the well-known saying. There’s a kind of poetic laboratory/studio here, with Peterson back and forth between bench and easel, a mental Bunsen burner not far from reach.

It’s a tough but gladdening call to decide what to quote next. If I could, I’d just crank out the whole volume, and print at the top : ENJOY, AND PREPARE TO BE BLOWN OPEN. Peterson always manages to pull off the tricky business of going from calm to energetic and back again without losing elegance in transition. “Evolution” does this especially well, with slivers of slyness piercing the lines from time to time :

So our toes and fingers were all roots, once touching,
and a body sometimes grown up
to a standing beast that later came loose from the earth,
nails painted red.
The tips of our backbones grew from their processes,
sunbursts, and then receded.
The hair on our bodies had been spines like a cactus,
had been grass growing
like water in the wind, and peach fur before that flowered
in the light
like the painted paper-thin azaleas bolted to the walls
of the St. Charles Inn
that opened with dawn and closed like breathing.
Still, I thought to escape from my birth family like
rockets the earth.
The lesson of change is there are no isolated cases,
and it’s not an error because things don’t go as we’d planned,
nor an accident when they do.
Such things are often decided in the last minute,
like lightning’s stepped leader,
down from clouds, finding the least existence every few hundred yards
until the discharge rises to meet it.
Only real life has slower zig- zags, leaving its burn marks on us,
foolprints one can follow,
made not with our feet, but presumptions
that everyone is satisfied
and will cheer wildly
if their hometown is mentioned.

Anthologists take note : Allan Peterson belongs with the best of them.

Related Posts:

• Collected Poems by Joseph Ceravolo
• Bright Wings An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds edited by Billy Collins
• The Emily Dickinson Reader by Paul Legault
• Inside/Out: Selected Poems by Marilyn Buck
• Poets Beyond the Barricade by Dale M Smith

Opening with an epigraph This false world alas! Who may it leve? from “Troilus and Criseyde,” she begins her ( Chorus: )

Everything is half here,
like the marble head
of the Greek warrior
and the lean torso
of his favorite.
The way the funnel cloud
which doesn’t seem
to touch ground does–
flips a few cars, a semi—
we learn to walk miles
above our bodies.
The pig farms dissolve,
then the small hills.
As in dreams fraught
with irrevocable gestures,
the ruined set seemed larger,
a charred place
the gaze tunnels through
and through . How well
we remember the stage—
the actors gliding about
like petite sails, the balustrade
cooling our palms.
Not wings or singing,
but a darkness fast as blood.
It ended at our fingertips.
The fence gave way.
The world began.

The epigraph provides a quick sound-flash before we understand that the fence has given way, the world has begun, in tornado country, drama-beyond-our-control country. We remember ballads that have entered us, consciously or unconsciously, from when we first heard music-speech, even without comprehension. The Story Is Out of Our Hands and in this case out of the characters’ hands, set in a place that is unincorporated in real life—as in not officially of the body of land that is mapped, bureaucratized, that shelters and legitimizes citizenship.

And so bifel, when commen was the tyme
Of April, when clothed is the mede
With new grene, of lusty Veere the pryme,
And swote smellen floures white and rede,
In sondry wises shewed, as I rede,
The folk of Troie hire observaunces olde,
Palladiones feste for to hilde.

This is the epigraph to the first section, in its entirety, and while in many cases epigraphs can be pompous distraction, here it is well chosen for two reasons . Readers deserve more of Chaucer’s inspiration-tongue for the sake of the poems to come, but also as more reminder of what English sounded like long ago and how part of us, yet gently foreign, earlier locutions can appear over time.

Abbate tells a piercing love- tale that includes natural and not so natural treachery, of landscape. It’s slippery business anywhere, and Criseyde’s voice, of a woman sometimes rock-solid and other times frighteningly wobbly, is well limned :

Dear (you know I never
rode horses well)
late April, your sinkholes
in full bloom.
The bus bucks,
the windows shiver.

I’ve never seen a street
open a fabulous new crater.
I was walking elsewhere,
eyes small
against the wind.
Was, will be, whatever.

She’s making the story itself part of the landscape, as opposed to the other way around, so what we have is landscape carving the story and a nod —I’m gratefully making this association though Abbate may not have intended it—to C. S. Giscombe and others who approach what is visible in fresh ways that appear on the surface to be both ordinary and spooky. When the poem continues , with the sight of an open tube of lipstick in a snowbank, she does not say it is red, but I believe that with her verbal gash, she wants you to assume that.

All the poems in this story-scape go back and forth between straightforward and blurred, much the way any unincorporated space within a designated area—parts of New Jersey’s Pine Barrens, for example— can be mysterious, startling and confining. Every boundary, emotional or geographically, does the same.

None of the poems here have conventional titles. They are called ( “Narrator,”) or (“Chorus” ) as if Abbate wants the whole to be performed, as if she is, like any playwright up against the confines of page/stage, and, in her case, breaking through. The next poem, in the voice of Troilus, is one of many that corroborate my point :

What lean pickings,
the body : like–
           oh, wood-char,
ochre, burnt coriander.

It was never like us.

If someone told you its nice here,
I want to be here always,
would you believe her?

Here : winter lights in the kitchen
when the geese come so close
you think the sky
is passing through.

You think : things whisper
in a gladness beyond us.

Its always a treat to a critic’s vanity when poem after poem illustrate an earlier statement, but do it in a way so immediately new they enter that place within where the gift of translating sight makes the soul sing. Join me in a repeating swoon over the last six lines above.

Abbate’s accomplishment continually rises like an unexpected yet inevitable encounter . Criseyde is concerned with dams that daily give out, in a contemporary flood and in her encounter with it, Abbate mixes newspaper quotes with Chaucer’s line, this litel spot of erthe,’ and here we are again, with forceful scholar and gifted poet mixing it up with perfect balance.

Troy, Unincorporated is the work of an academic/artist making the old new, making contemporary experience into something alive, one would wish, for a very long time.

Related Posts:

• Collected Poems by Joseph Ceravolo
• Bright Wings An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds edited by Billy Collins
• The Emily Dickinson Reader by Paul Legault
• Inside/Out: Selected Poems by Marilyn Buck
• Poets Beyond the Barricade by Dale M Smith