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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Rob Griffith, in The Moon from Every Window, attempts many things at once, which isn’t surprising from a poetry collection. What surprises, though, is how well he accomplishes them. In three very different but equally gorgeous sections, Griffith guides us through every poetic form from sonnet to villanelle, all while examining the idea of what it means to be in one place instead of all others, what it means not to know your own momentum and position at the same time, to never see the moon from every window.

In the first section, Griffith deals with domesticity, sharpening his poetry on everyday ideas. The collection opens with “The War at Home,” where a dog, “a boxer mix,” wages war on a springtime hydrangea by habitually using the bush as his toilet, but try as the dog may, he can’t win the war and kill the flower. What does this mean for the dog? For us, who may be trapped in similar wars at home that we will never win? Through the course of the section, Griffith explores a relationship falling apart. In Griffith’s world, we all become chained to monotony, even the undead. In “When the Zombies Come,” what is interesting is not that zombies descend; it is that the zombies quickly become us. The poem concludes:

I like to think they’ll mill and stare, then bend
to take up our uniforms, our jobs
and lives—a zombie checkout boy who sacks
the bread and eggs; the zombie line ref
who shambles downfield to make some bad calls;
and zombie teachers gurgling out declensions
for lie and lay. And at a desk, paused
with pen in hand, a zombie poet writes
a zombie sonnet for his sonnet love. He sings
of flawless gray skin, of eyes like curdled milk.

Here we see how Griffith shines. His exquisite verb choice (“mill,” “gurgling,” “paused,” “shambles”), his intriguing line endings (to pause on the word “pause” is at once obvious and effective), and his ability to make everything mundane (even a zombie invasion) show Griffith’s attention to language and the discipline of poetry.

The most notable and obvious evidence of his devotion to detail is his pervasive use of poetic forms. Like Natasha Trethewey in Native Guard, Griffith employs poems that adhere to forms at random, causing the reader to constantly ask, “Is this poem a form I don’t know?” Usually I am unimpressed by neo-formalism since form usually trumps content, but Griffith manages to utilize form without sacrificing what he has to say. “Heisenberg to His Wife” is a sonnet, “Patchwork Garden” is a haiku (and like all haikus, it is too short to be effective), and other poems show an impressive penchant for blank verse, as seen in this opening line from “For a Party at a Friend’s House,” “Not everything is elegy, thank God…” And this wordplay shows another of Griffith’s strengths: humor. Like the zombies, Griffith’s poetry does not take itself too seriously, even when it wanders into heavy physics.

The second section of the book focuses on two seemingly random and unrelated thinkers, Werner Heisenberg and Jonathan Edwards. In the first poem of the section, “Heisenberg’s Love Song,” Griffith begins with an epigraph from Heisenberg: “The momentum and position of a particle cannot / both be known at the same time. Knowing one will disrupt / knowing the other.” The section explores the idea of our inability to know where we are and where we are going. This builds off the collapsed domesticity of the first section. “Heisenberg’s Love Song” ends: “Are you moving toward me or away?” The final stanza of the second poem in the section, “Heisenberg to His Wife,” reads:

And nearly everywhere at once, it jumps
From state to state, absorbing and emitting
All those quanta—a light switch off or on,
No in-betweens. It’s here we are finally stumped.
Like love, the change is total, and I’ll admit,
The trouble lies in telling when it’s gone.

We cannot know our position and momentum, Griffith seems to say. Instead, as he declares in “Heisenberg in Old Age,”

each moment is simply a kind of waiting
for the next, a halfway house where no one leaves.
He wonders what it’s all for, a world
where the present is myth and nothing exists
but memory and anticipation.

Griffith, with all his deft wordplay and formal skills, is most impressive with his consistency to his poetic project. The Moon from Every Window meditates on the Heisenberg principle, that a particle’s momentum and position cannot both be known, and how it relates to people. By introducing the idea in the second section makes a reader rethink the first section, which is thrilling. With only a few exceptions, like “Ruth’s Alexandriad” which lacks impact, the poems in this collection succeed. The third section, with multiple poems about fishing, show a speaker on the move, either hitchhiking in Tennessee or finding his Chinese doppelgänger, showing a man now aware that where he is and where he is going cannot both be know, so he focuses only on where he is. The final lines in this strong, intriguing collection, in a poem called “Disappearing,” read: “…I’d just be gone, / like stars swallowed by the mackerel-light of dawn.”

Read “Disappearing,” a Rumpus Original Poem by Rob Griffith.

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What a collection! Marianne Boruch’s The Book of Hours is the work of a grown-up, full of gravity and understanding. These poems are sharp reflections, half caught before they’re gone. The words don’t always line up in sentences with conventional meanings, but at the same time, you know what Boruch is getting at, and her insights are worth the attention.

I’ll write a poem down whole–these are impossible to subdivide and get at the sense of them. Perhaps that’s high enough praise of a poet? She’s making things whole and smooth; chopping one up is like slicing into a raw egg.

Take a look at this one, called “To live in the bird guide, the yellowthroat’s”

To live in the bird guide, the yellowthroat’s
down thicket and hedgerow, like any
storybook would have it. And maybe his
witchety witchety witchety is love my life!

Times three. It could be steely: how dare you
and what do you know of migration
and ice. It’s the edge, prime happenstance
between woods and field, most ordinary

tangle of vine into brush. But his new
pause before each overdrive triplet
means some weather’s coming, weather
said secret, with a spike through it.

No. I’m bad weather closing in,
his silence tripped by my noise, my shade.
four seconds of threat. He’s at it again,
his fate to say nothing he says.

Like Wallace Stevens and his “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” this poem rolls around the yellowthroat, and you see why I couldn’t leave off any lines and still make any kind of point about it—as her phrases leave us off balance and looking around corners, “it’s the edge, prime happenstance/between woods and field, most ordinary” we wheel around the stand-off between the yellowthroat and the person—is it right to watch a bird survive for an aesthetic delight? The person’s shadow frightens the bird, even as she loves the bird’s life—and then, in the last line, a reminder how opaque the bird’s meanings and intentions are to the human mind.

Another poem, “In the crosshairs of mystery, they” juxtaposes the viscerally of death—one’s own personal death—beside the conventional phrases, the religion and the hospital IV.

Here it is, complete:

In the crosshairs of mystery, they
say to say: you can let go now (mother,
father, fill-in-the-blank). I know you’re only
holding on for us. Imagine. But imagine

the body. Imagine only half scenes and flashes,
decades of nothing between. You’re eighty,
in a diaper, everyone too nice, words
fast, too faint, making over the pretty flowers.

How many IVs? How much oxygen?
Our sitting there, our staring—she did let go of that,
the room, the cheap chairs, let go of Mondays, the guy
bringing the host to her from Mass, gravely aware

of his part in the drama, then someone else
entirely when no, she turned away.
Later, how to find her? I tried blurting out.
I tried letting go of the sentence, midsentence.

The poems jump into the air, twists around and land somewhere five feet away, you can see how impossible it would be to quote a line or two for purposes of review. These poems are sophisticated, mature works. I hope, in writing about them, that I don’t give the false impression that I’ve got to the bottom of what they have to offer. They’re often about the strange, complex and imperfect mapping of nature—human and wild—onto our 21st century lives. The nature Boruch has in her crosshairs; sometimes it’s the yellowthroat’s witchety witchety witchety, and sometimes it’s our own mystery.

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My kingdom for Dora Malech’s lexical agility! Say So is the second collection from this pedigreed poet, and it swings on elephant wings. By that I mean Malech manages to make nimble meaning out of our current crop of clichés by a variety of methods, whether that means mashing up figures of speech:

If I were an operation, I’d be fly by night
and very bloody. …
— “Face For Radio”

or applying a devastating twist to an aphorism:

The way to a man’s heart is through his ribcage.
— “Goodbye, I Love You”

or creating a slightly new aphorism that seems truer the more you think about it:

…Best
left unsaid: Oops. …
— “Note to So Sorry for Self

In our everyday language — which is so often blundering, clunky and obfuscatory — Malech finds, in her way, as much room for rejoicing as Whitman did. While the invocation of Whitman isn’t exactly right — Malech is more of a miniaturist (but then, next to Walt, isn’t everyone?), there is something about Malech’s reveling in the American demotic that is bound to draw comparisons to Walt (at least one, anyway), especially to his exuberance. Because Say So is exuberant, if subtler and more difficult than Leaves of Grass. Where Whitman’s lines are cataracts down cliffsides, Malech’s are levers in Rube Goldberg machines, each line activating the next one as the poem careens toward its end, one step ahead of the entire contraption’s collapse:

K.O. to my O.T. and bait to my switch, I crown
you one-trick pony to my one-horse town,
…
…Let me begin by saying if he hollers,
end with goes the weasel. In between,
cream filling. Get over it, meaning, the moon. …
…
My fruit bat, my gewgaw. You had me at no duh.
— From “Love Poem”

There is no solid footing here. Taking a tentative step onto “if he hollers,” we suddenly find ourselves at the other end of a different children’s rhyme, “goes the weasel”. As the line breaks, Malech seems to promise an explanation of how we got from “hollers” to “weasel” by telling us what came “[i]n between…”. Instead, we get “cream filling” — a figurative pie in the face.

That bit of prosodic slapstick is a Malech hallmark. She is often mordantly funny, as in this deadpan opening to a poem called “Inventing the Body”: “The lungs were my idea./Shins, his./Breasts, mine, though he agreed.” If I seem to be surveying Say So’s surfaces while dancing around the question of what these poems are about, well, I would argue (somewhat conveniently) that it’s unavoidable. For me, these poems are about unintentional association, the ways our minds wander even when — especially when? — they’re trying to wrap themselves around a given idea. These poems explore the mind’s language leaks, its mission creep, by enacting them.

Earlier this year, Malech told “Bookworm” host Michael Silverblatt “Uh oh” hugs ‘ha ha’ uncomfortably close,” which is the pithiest explication of the double-sided nature of comedy I’ve ever heard.

Malech’s playfulness with language extends past the aural, as her jokes and near-miss puns can also often be visual, so much so that you can sometimes almost mistake them for typos.
For instance:

For his sake I steered clear or flicker,
singed the noodles, sang for supper —
— From “Relatively Long Arms”

or:

Now solve for x where mph is speed and oomph is impact
— From “Them’s Fighting Words”

or:

Here lies the sigh begun nine lines ago.
— From “Flight, Fight Or”

The title of this last poem is one of four which seem to be from Malech’s imaginary index of clichés, which includes “Forever Hold Your Peace, Speak Now Or”, “Break, Make Or”, and “Go, Touch And”.

Say So also includes a group of prose poems which, for my money, are not as strong as her more whimsical, rollicking, rickety lyrics. (Further disclosure: I once worked at ReDivider, the Emerson College-based journal in which two of the poems Malech collects here first appeared. However, as Nonfiction Editor I had no input into the poetry content.)

That’s not to say the prose poems aren’t often enjoyable. In fact, they contain some of Malech’s shiniest gems, such as “Past tense is too easy, turns tale vestigial only.” or the haunting “Yes, I cross my legs and bolt my door, read boys/girls as boys slash girls.” Those lines are from “Canzone: How To” and the volume-ending, really excellent “Body Language.” In other words, I would not want to have missed the prose poems in this book, I am just less likely to return to them.

Because this is a book to be returned to — to be sampled and enjoyed and mulled over. For all my enthusiasm for Malech’s magnificent wordplay, it can become overwhelming in one sitting, as you feel yourself pummeled by double- and triple-entendres.

“The words too whoseoever,” Beckett wrote in his late work Worstward Ho!. “What room for worse! How almost true they sometimes ring!” At her best, Malech reinvigorates some of those worn out words and idioms, making them ring just a little truer. In the process, she reminds us, in her words, of “[t]he privilege of language,/the privy and the ledge.”

Read “Thousands are gathered outside the interior ministry,” a Rumpus Original Poem by Dora Malech.

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In the poem “Phil–,” the speaker warns of the dangers of “focus[ing] on one thing / and mak[ing] it stand for every thing,” which is a good piece of advice for any reader of One Sleeps The Other Doesn’t, Jacqueline Waters long-awaited second book of poetry. The book, which is just over 100 pages long, consists of 14 poems–not including the poems-within-poem that appear in “Hello Due to Confusion: A Guard: II.” And while many of the poems are long, discursive, and paratactic, the book resists being easily summed up or captured in a brief blurb.

The poems often read as an extended conversation with one’s self, or perhaps with an other. In “Garden of Eden a College,” which was originally published as a chapbook from A Rest Press, the speaker claims, “my affairs / are just my questions,” and later in the poem a voice, perhaps the speaker’s inner-editor, parenthetically says, “These are all very good questions but stop / asking them.” And so there is a visible struggle in these poems–the reader gets to see the speaker thinking through ideas, expressing her doubts, and all the mess and contradictions that includes.

This is especially the case in “Garden of Eden a College,” where two characters, Jacqueline and Lampwick, appear and seem to be in a constant back-and-forth, tug-of-war, question-and-answer. Lampwick exists in opposition to Jacqueline and interrogates her. However, a strange slippage occurs in the back-and-forth and it can become unclear who is speaking. For example, “Lampwick this is not what you are looking for / or it is and you are totally embarrassed,” most likely should be read as Jacqueline addressing Lampwick; however, after so many of these exchanges and the strange way the characters constantly address each other by name, it is easy to begin reading it as one might a play, “Lampwick[:] [T]his is not…” Ultimately, it doesn’t seem to matter who is responsible for saying what, as the struggle between the two characters could easily be a struggle within a single, splintered self. This sort of shift in voice, or talking to or questioning one’s self, works well at the close of another long poem, “The Saw That Talked”:

How I can frame it aw I don’t know
cut-throat
Not that I feel that way
but that it appeals to me
to what
to feel that way

The “to what” in the penultimate line–the stutter, or hesitation, or interrupting voice–adds an interesting layer to the poem. Instead of the poem as monologue, we have the poem as dialogue.

Like “Garden of Eden a College” and “The Saw That Talked,” the poems throughout the collection easily lend themselves to multiple readings. The overall lack of punctuation can draw into question where one statement ends and a new one begins, and that is one of the pleasures of these poems. Another pleasure comes in the strangeness and playfulness in language, beginning with the weirdly wonderful enjambment of the book’s title. One poem is titled “Guard of an Eaten Collage: A Guard: I,” and the next poem is “The Garden of Eden a College.” “Garden of Eden” is preceded and followed by “guards,” which is explained in a fourth poem, “Somnambulism.” Written in two columns, “Somnambulism” reads like two separate pieces: one half reads like a performance piece that would fit alongside the imaginative blueprints for plays that appear in Jonathan Ball’s 2010 Coach House release, Clockfire; the other half reads as a straight-forward explanation for the poems that precede it:

I thought if my produc-
tions would not or could
not protect me, I could, at
the very least, protect my
productions. To protect
one production I imagined
especially vulnerable I pro-
duced other productions to
act as guards.

There are a number of lines that can be culled throughout the collection that speak to the act of writing itself, but if one were to draw too much attention to these statements, one would be in danger of focusing on one part and trying to make it represent the whole.

Throughout the book, the tone often comes across as flat or indifferent. In the opening poem, “A Ploy,” the speaker claims:

no emotion is pleasing!
each must be rejected
        replaced by an opposite
in turn rejected and replaced by yet another
strain of undifferentiated sentiment

There is also a sense of exhaustion: “Jackie I see / Lampwick I tire.” This exhaustion, or perhaps emotional remove, lends itself to wonderful descriptions that get at the strangeness of so many things people have accepted as normal in their lives. For example, “The Tax,” looks at relationships and the odd exchange of saying “I love you,” which “Begets an I LOVE YOU back, or it falters / As it its harbor / Fails to find.” And later, the poem looks at the structure of relationships:

…they are structures
These arrangements: living together
Sleeping alongside, staying awake while the other one sleeps. You have
To care! Be the sun
shining through a watery cloud, or the cloud
Creased to a white veil
Since where you believe you have power you don’t
And where you do you refuse to wield it

In the opening poem, “A Ploy,” “you” are instructed to reject your emotions until “you find your ways / have rearranged you slightly.” Although this rearrangement is not as extreme as Rimbaud’s idea of a complete derangement of the senses, Jacqueline Waters is definitely onto something here. This slight rearrangement results in unique descriptions and a worldview that gleans from a wide range of sources–from Jack Lemmon, to Apollinaire, to Linda Napolitano’s UFO abduction–however, the biggest source seems to be Waters own inner-self. This is an intelligent and well-crafted poetry that demands multiple readings. And it is a voice–perhaps a bit apprehensive and damaged by experience–that seems willing to express it all, even the ugly and cruel.

Read “Scissor Half,” a Rumpus Original Poem by Jacqueline Waters.

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What I noticed first about Nancy Kuhl’s chapbook Little Winter Theater was not just the emotional depth of the poems, but the lines themselves. Kuhl’s words build themselves into crescendo:

…the secrets aren’t
the interesting part the only part
tonight will be winter and we may
go under we may yet drown and here
in possibility’s dim and quavering
strike I would peel skin from knuckle
and wrist I would give jawbone
or eyelid or tongue

(“Echo’s Body”)

Perhaps I’m giving too much away too early, but I want you to watch with me how these poems build into fierceness; with Kuhl, there is no turning back. Little Winter Theater details a rough spot in a relationship. As readers we are given no other information but what is in the poems, no history of the relationship, no names, nothing to base a story upon. If Kuhl were to give us this information, the fire would go out of these poems. All we need pay attention to is what goes on while we’re in this room, this little theater, where we wait with the speaker for something to happen:

my suspended second story
tilts keen and madly swaying
wild a ship’s transom untethered

(“Fray”)

and

It might collapse at any moment, the room;
might come apart at the seams. Drifts in mist

in rain; wind shook everything, almost shook
everything loose.

(“Morning Provisional”)

We sit in an idling car with the speaker, receiving then later waiting for a text message
to appear on the phone:

…our momentary
messages collecting in phonelight
and the voice braids itself backward
a new silence pushes lexicon
to the brink

(“TXT”)

and later:

And O tiny phone, flat
and shining and still,

O won’t you?

(“Waiting, With Prayer”)

We watch as the partners return to one another and mirror each other in their desire:

…the way fingers
give up their secret in clumsy
silk unbuttonings now
I’ve forgotten what you said
about the echo chamber precision
of our speech because
the condition of this knowledge
is visual alone it’s between us

(“Language of Mirrors”)

The poem “Language of Mirrors” speaks to a theme that runs throughout the poems: the echo. In this poem, what happens between the two lovers will echo beyond this moment, and in other poems, word spoken echo as well: “echo speaks / first return returning refrain resounding / voice voice voice and oh how I listen” (“Echo’s Voice”). Further on, the echo becomes only words lost in desire –I want and I want more of everything / illuminated page tedious marks / the sender is only echo (“Network, Constellation”)—and starts to become lost entirely as “sound decaying within the ear” (“Grieving Narcissus”). With these echoes, these sounds, Kuhl leads us to a place where the speaker remembers speech and breath, desire falling among them:

your voice never wavered
same little words like a fist

to back like a hard fall the air
knocked out still wanting

regardless

and

the moment dark imagines itself
back in time at once this is

how the body understands mouth
and breath

(“Reckoning”)

These are poems that want to be breathless, that want to mirror the intensity of passion and desire and heartbreak, and leave the reader light-headed. Even when we sit still in a room or in a car, waiting, the words won’t let us be: words spoken, words texted, the multi-literacies of touch. These are poems that speak, that rush, but take your time with these poems. Read them slowly, no matter how much they want to speed. Pay attention to Kuhl’s use of the poetic line. These are poems to savor, to study, to bring to the space of our own lives.

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Albert Goldbarth is almost certainly a happy man. For most contemporary American poets, being accused of such as thing would be a slur. But Goldbarth still infuses his poems with an old-fashioned, childlike wonder at the marvels of our world, along with a bemused chuckle at the ways in which we so obviously fall short of our lofty goals.

In his new volume, Everyday People, Goldbarth intends for all of us to share those lofty goals. After 31 books, he continues to be driven by a devout curiosity about both the intellectual—he devotes poems to Darwin, Darwin’s wife Emma, Darwin’s contemporaries, 19th century German artist Adolph von Menzel, and English scientist Rupert Sheldrake among others—and the profane; in his expansive verse, we find cameo appearances by joint-smoking car mechanics, a divorcé who sleeps—like a feral animal—in the woods, even Rod Stewart. The bifurcated nature of his subjects and their bulk, their sometimes meandering line lengths, are all the distinguishing physical characteristics of a Goldbarth poem, yet he’s as much interested in metaphysics and cosmology as he is in alcoholism and infidelity (usually other people’s).

It might be easy to dismiss Goldbarth’s symphonic voice as predictable, as much a limited palette as the chamber pieces of Philip Levine’s blue collar lyrics. As Eric McHenry suggested in Slate almost a decade ago, Goldbarth resists the idea that lyricism is defined by an economy of language, in favor of a discursive and at times outright conversational mode. Whatever Goldbarth’s many pleasures, there’s an awareness too that the work itself is long-winded, exclamatory, even at times ranting. But his metaphoric control is so enviable, as in “The salmon drags across/the final miles of migration and it dwindles/in its task, like an eraser,” that his extended comparisons remain both artful and inevitably precise.

In “A Great Volume,” a four-page riff on Darwin’s interest in seaweed, Goldbarth wanders perhaps farthest afield, pausing to begin a new section of the poem with an almost prosaic transition, “One of those nights with good wine and companionship/where the high-minded bullshit accumulates.” It’s the perfect example of how Goldbarth uses levity to deflect the most frequent criticism of his work, that his poems don’t offer the intense and sustained control of those small lyrics. It’s an argument that he’s heard before, and not only is he aware of it, at first blush he appears to agree with the assertion. Take these lines from “A Story,” a poem that begins with an epigraph from Goldbarth’s late colleague Margaret Rabb.

…Even history
implies sequential happenstance—a story—although
we “know” this is in part our human need to read causation
into our serendipity-finds of homo erectus bones,
and the backroom plotting of timber and oil barons,
and the marriages and sunderings that mark dynastic lines
like the knows on a quipu, “I walked through the rubble
and glitz of the latter twentieth century, and I saw X,
which was flabbergastingly horrid, then Y, then Z,
these left me beaming out a living light
like an angel pricked with breathing holes.”

Indeed that poem may be the best synecdoche not only for Goldbarth’s work in this book, but for his career. He’s acknowledging that the catalog of metaphors in such highly referential poetry—including his own—can be overwhelming. After all, this is a man who called his most recent volume of selected poems The Kitchen Sink. Buried within “A Story” however is a poet with a confident worldview, one that manages a biting criticism of other, less ambitious contemporary work: the poetry of reportage has evolved to such a dominant state that its movements, even when they dissolve into finely wrought metaphor, are cliché. In essence, he’s written a type of poem that he never wants to write again.

If Goldbarth belongs to a school, he is surely its sole member; he’s not as interested in the colloquial as his contemporaries, those poets that Mark Halliday and David Graham label as purveyors of “ultra-talk,” and Goldbarth almost religiously shuns the ephemeral or deliberately obtuse qualities of what Stephen Burt calls “elliptical poetry.” Yet to discuss Goldbarth using expressed or implied comparisons to other poets is a poor choice. If metaphors about the Beatles have dominated popular music criticism for the past 45 years, then so too has the urge to define poets solely in terms of their antecedents and contemporaries. What’s more striking about Everyday People is that the catalog of proper nouns that populate the Goldbarthian poem never threaten to subsume the lives of the people who live there; “Our Heroine Ellen, and Three Pals” demonstrates Goldbarth’s prodigious gift, the ability to distill from all of that emotional Wagnerism a sense of empathy for each character he sees. Yes, he’s more interested in the other rather than the self, but Goldbarth wants to make sure that the reader sees us all as equals, including Short George, one of Ellen’s titular pals, who makes the following cameo:

At home tonight Short George is making up,
online, the rules and shoes and musics and peninsulas
of an entire cosmos. Why not? Someone hurt him
once, and here, he heals. Someone grabbed him
by the smitten-bone, grabbed him by the spigot
where the juice of infatuation enters the blood, and he was severely
pummeled, and never the same, but here he’s the master
of clouds and swords and fishing fleets and mass migrations
and here he can sorcer into existence a cure for the thing
that eats it way through Ellen’s shoulder and Keats’s lungs,
and here Short George can manfully declare his love for Dora,
which he’d never do in the bruises and blades of the “real world,”

Goldbarth prefers to write from his comfortable perspective, a voice that time and again pulls off the nearly impossible trick of being didactic and inviting both. It’s no accident that so many of his poems have at their center a pleasant and domestic scene, say drinking wine on a porch, or the dinner party from “A Great Volume.” Often, the voice conjures Goldbarth himself, doing the observational work of a poet: reading the Fortean Times, a magazine of strange phenomena, in a library chair, or eavesdropping on a public conversation. The openness of that voice, and our willingness to listen to it (sometimes at great length) is Goldbarth’s greatest accomplishment. He’s an intellectual omnivore, but his interpretation never comes at the expense of the reader’s own. He’s simply, along with David Kirby, one of our most generous working poets, and that generosity extends to a type of thank you found in the book’s concluding poem, which ends, “In my time I wrote this very thing./In your time you read it.” And that’s ultimately the idea that binds Everyday People, and Goldbarth’s oeuvre, together, that beyond reportage lies one more important fact: we did these things together.

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Stealth is a strategy, a way to “witness without being seen.” It is this kind of witnessing that motors the four sections of Stealth, a new collaborative work by Maureen Seaton and Samuel Ace. In a concluding note, the poets describe the process of writing, when they allowed “the pieces to reveal themselves over a year,” ultimately creating poems addressing “the space in each of us that seeks authenticity and autonomy, but sometimes finds it necessary… to hide.” The poems are themselves stealthy, hiding but then eventually revealing themselves to the writers. Or the stealth writers, both Seaton and Ace autonomous and authentic somewhere in that collaborative voice.

Often, this process is less about what we hide from or reveal to others and more about how we understand ourselves. We’re alienated from our bodies, even if that’s all we have. “What happened to my legs? They seem so / rabid, furious, relentless.” The domestic becomes a liminal space (or “transliminal,” as one section has it), the site of half-truths and concealed intentions, where someone “stands and walks back from where he came” again and again. Stealth’s collaborative voice reflects these experiences, moving quickly between straightforward observations and unexpected, weird imagery. “He crawls, he pleads, exhausted. Lying down in the wash / He sees his stubby soul caught in branches, hanging low.”

As a strategy, this type of stealth creates a very particular set of poems. They are fractured, shadowed, off-in-the-corner poems. They link together in long sequences that sometimes suggest narratives, but the narratives are the stories that follow disasters and survival, more about the act of taking stock and staying alive than about connecting the dots. These poems have secrets, and while there is some pleasure to be had in puzzling with them, they aren’t really designed to give up their inner selves. “Just when you think you’re sure/ you become the fusey spark,” as the prologue declares, trying to make sense of the moon.

Certainly, it is the stealthy qualities of these poems, their danger, that make them exciting to read. Once you start to get your finger on something, it transforms itself, sheds a skin or hits puberty. In “Secret 22 (yellowthroat),” for instance, the uncertain “Well maybe a bird” becomes “well maybe / a cruel mascara,” “well maybe a throat,” and “well maybe the yellow / of Jewish stars,” all within a page. And as the images and the language shifts, so do the themes, so that poems are as often about the need to go somewhere new as they are about the need to stay.

This stealth is also a challenge, however. Or, in an occasional stumble, a block to whatever else might be there. Bringing together the stealth that is the name of a rollercoaster, the stealth that is the name of an aircraft, the stealth of gender and of war and pretend—the connecting threads themselves are hiding, which is exciting if not also the thing that can slow you down when you want to push forward. As one poems declares,

It’s what happens
when you push
your cock into
water you simply
die of want

Not satisfying in the sense you might expect or want, but insisting instead on something else, trying to lure some other type of pleasure out of the language.

It is fitting that the final section of the collaboration, the “Epilogue,” both gestures toward some explanatory notes while also complicating the whole business. We’re given biographical details, historical accounts, and biology lessons, all revealing the facts that are at the stealth center of the poems. The section is also littered with its own lines, shards of verses with no set place to go. Clues, maybe, but without any eureka moments, the breadcrumbs leading in all directions. It concludes, “Or any of several variations of the above.”

If stealth is a way of being it is also a way of escaping, of finding somewhere new to escape from. “It is said we come to the desert to burn through // Whatever holds us there,” one poem declares. This burning is the constant burning of Stealth, of those who “volcanized the earth.” Put another way, “thumbs turned heartward, they burned.” Demanding “throw me down in scorched sand.” The fire is phoenix-like, but rather than emerging beautiful and fresh, we emerge just as complex and messed up as before, the earth holding whatever damage we have tried to forget. We can try to be invisible, the poems seem to say, but invisibility is not an easy thing, the periphery of passing both a safe and a dangerous place to end up. A perfect and difficult subject for a collaboration, these two talented voices hybridizing themselves into something new, urging us “rupture, little one, into the next human hell, the next human heaven.”

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“If there is a San Francisco state of mind—calm, unburdened with practical worries, nostalgic, slightly mawkish, indulgent of beauty (spoiled by it, even)—Madonna proves that this can exist anywhere, just as any San Franciscan knows that it cannot always exist in this city.”

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Reading the work of Karl Kirchwey feels like getting to spend quality time with a resurrected Modernist. With its tight structure and deft language woven on a loom of history and mythology, the poetry maintains the kind of gravity and allusive depth T. S. Eliot dreamed of. It is as if Kirchwey spilled a bit of Frazier, Faulkner, Joyce, and H.D. and let it run joyously through the veins of his imagination.

Mount Lebanon is the latest Kirchwey volume. Its title references New Lebanon, New York, the site of the Mount Lebanon Shaker Society and center of the Shaker movement beginning in the late eighteenth century. Haunted by the paradoxes associated with Shakerism that both glorified and doomed it, Kirchwey uses the place of Mount Lebanon to explore a layering of spaces and themes that accesses vast time and situation. In fact, the eponymous poem serves its role well, as “Mount Lebanon” encapsulates the issues that occupy Kirchwey: the causes of an extinction of a culture, the forgetting of that culture, and the resurrection of it through art that is equated with new flowering.

The book is divided into three sections. The first, “Spirit-Land,” literally considers spirits/ghosts in a present-day landscape. The most obvious ghosts are those of the Shakers, and Kirchwey draws a contrast between their carefully constructed spaces and the current waste-land of interstate highways, used car lots, and fields of Coke cans that has replaced them. But those are not all: Kirchwey also cites such individuals as the Visigoth king Alaric—who dictated that he be buried with his treasure and the Busento River diverted to obscure the burial place—to show the irrecoverability of history. Also running through the poems in the first section (and beyond) is a focus on the death of the poet’s mother; her ghost broods over the book as surely as those of the Shakers.

The second section bears the title “Fleshing Off,” the Shakers’ word for sex. As Kirchwey writes in “Mount Lebanon,”

It angered me, such willful paradox:

***

that male and female might, loving, subsist
            as one in God, yet be denied the work
            of natural generation, for the spark
                        of earthly love, what they called “fleshing off,”
they impatiently and contemptuously dismissed.

Given the above passage, the reader might expect the second section to be a reveling in carnal pleasure, but Kirchwey is after bigger game. He ponders, in an impressively nuanced way, not just the grandness of sexuality but also the other rich things lost when procreation is removed from life experience. “A Glass of Water” and “Barnegat Light” are tender poems about the emotions the poet feels in connection with his daughter, capturing heartbreakingly quiet moments of pride and love for a child—her leaving behind a glass of water on the breakfast table to go out and play, her complaining “I’m afraid in my legs” (51) when walking up the 217 stairs of a lighthouse on a family outing. Likewise “Blue” talks wittily about the poet’s son dyeing his hair that color, and “September” remembers a picnic at Valley Forge, a poignant other setting full of a different kind of iconic significance but evoked against the endearing banality of a family event.

“In the Garden” is the title for the volume’s final section, and its underlying theme is a Whitmanian rebirth/continuance of the past. The catalog of flowers is impressive in these poems, and their emblematic purpose seems clear enough. But another part of Kirchwey’s garden are Classical statues that represent the traces of past cultures: here the Classical elements that appear throughout the book become even more prominent, their presence representing the abstract concept of survival. This is a quiet kind of survival and at times an oddly postmodern one that rankles with the more negative connotation of postmodernity in the first section of the book. In “Crape Myrtle,” for example, the poet has bought a copy of the Dying Gaul statue for his garden from a library sale: purchased as such, the monument brings ancient Rome into present-day America, the statue depicting the preservation of a soldier’s life on the cusp of extinction, the copy of a copy (of a Greek original) removed from a repository of writing, an archive (a secret, in the Derridean sense) and placed in a location of flowering life. The poem also references a bust of Julius Caesar exhumed from the Rhône River, the conqueror of Gaul surviving his vindictive beheading and burial. Such emblems of survival befit the quiet stamina of the Shakers themselves—their survival in memory and in the objects they crafted if not in actuality—Kirchwey’s book being a monument to the survival of that memory, that ghost.

This quietness is the overall strength of the book. Although Kirchwey explores more graphic images of Vietnam and war generally in the final section (elements that may strike the reader as being abrupt and their relevance strained), the poems in Mount Lebanon are not demonstrative. They are the works of a poet dedicated to the strength of craft, to the idea that patient talented work produces poems of high worth based on their integrity as crafted items. Whether the poems proceed in a complex rhyme scheme or ramble outside the confines of traditional structures, they always present in the full polish of careful crafting. In terms of image patterns and thematic layers, Kirchwey takes no less care, holding multiple moments and places in an impressively even palimpsestual fabric reaching from the classical to the present.

Again, this latter technique is a hallmark of Kirchwey’s writing, as his mytho-historical sense consistently shows the significance of Western culture’s foundational images in the present moment. Although he evokes Christian elements and a significant strain of Eastern religious language and imagery runs through the poems, his dedication to keeping the book relentlessly pagan is impressive. This focus appears not only in his original poetry but also in appropriate translations, such as that of Rimbaud’s “Faun’s Head.” At one point, Kirchwey flirts with an iconic Christian moment in the lines,“He cursed the fig when he passed it the first time,/because he was hungry and it bore nothing for him” (68) from “Epigrams on the Fig” but insists that the “he” refers to Hephaestus instead of Christ. One gets the sense that the Classical world is very alive for Kirchwey (perhaps being the Andrew Heiskell Arts Director at the American Academy in Rome helps), and that aliveness quickens the present moment and, by extension, his poetry.

These poems have evocative power, but again their real strength lies in their craft and their allusion. With this book the reader gets an array of well-turned beauties, and reading them brings the kind of satisfaction such crafting offers.

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