reviewed by James Crews

In the glut of poetry books being published these days, it’s easy for collections like Michael Walsh’s The Dirt Riddles to get lost in the shuffle. Perhaps it’s also easy in our current literary climate for poets who choose to write accessibly about the natural world to fall by the wayside, for who can compete for the limelight if you don’t have a gimmick, aren’t published by one of the larger presses like Graywolf or Copper Canyon? The literary world seldom takes notice. Though I suspect that a poet like Walsh cares little for insular literary fame, his first collection—winner of the inaugural 2010 Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize and the 2011 Thom Gunn Award for Poetry—should have garnered far more attention upon its publication. The Dirt Riddles, like Bruce Snider’s Paradise, Indiana, released earlier this year, focuses partly on growing up gay in the Midwest and examines the indelible mark the land has left on the poet. Michael Walsh came of age on a dairy farm in western Minnesota, but unlike many gay poets writing today, who often characterize their hometowns as places to flee, Walsh writes with relish of the land that made him who he is, and continues to do so. In “Flyover,” he says:

These poems ask us to look around, below and inside of the ordinary things of the world, and they don’t shy from speaking of family or nature—two subjects so many contemporary poets have spurned in favor of the “skittery poem” (as Tony Hoagland describes it), which seldom lingers long enough on a scene or object to give us a full impression of it—or of the writer. Over and over, Walsh references the “fossils” he uncovers, the fresh revelations he finds simply by walking out into the yard. He loves this land and its animals. In “First Kisses,” he confesses:

He is speaking ostensibly to a lover in this poem, but he’s also talking to his readers. He is literally kissing the earth he describes so that we might know the complicated, sometimes ambivalent relationship he has with what is his inheritance. Because his poems often take their time and actually employ metaphor and simile to surprise us, many of them slowly acquire what Ted Kooser has called “an overlay of magic,” without going so far as to exclude the average reader.  “Inheritance” begins with the line, “Rust blooms across my land,” and ends with this striking image:

It’s lovely language on the surface, but if we look deeper, we see that it works on another level too: the rust he observes on “nail points” has “pollinated” his hands so that he might write about it, reproducing it for others to see. Though the art of metaphor more often than not seems dead these days, Walsh proves that the right image at the right time can still stir the reader, can send a shiver up her or his spine in. Take “Buffalo Bones,” as another instance of the poet recounting an experience so clearly and accessibly to the reader that it becomes universal, as inevitable as myth:

Anyone who’s spent time on the prairie knows that the wind is capable of playing any number of tricks on the mind and that the land feels haunted by bison, which were slaughtered and decimated. It’s commendable that, even as Walsh speaks of dark matters, of the difficult aspects of growing up gay in a rural place, his poems never devolve into self-pity or melodrama; they skirt the boundary between sentiment and artifice and end up moving us again and again. Thus, he’s capable of writing a poem like “Bully,” whose harsh consonance and crystallized lines give us only what we need to understand what it must have felt like to have been tortured by someone the speaker was also inexplicably attracted to:

He also captures the challenges of continuing to live in a place where the simplest act—giving your lover a “peck” on the cheek in a gas station, for example—can breed instant, if unspoken aggression:

It should go without saying by now that these poems are simply a pleasure to read (and they are meant to be read aloud), their sounds in the mouth a delicate music very few take the time to conjure anymore. “Haying the Fields” finds Walsh yet again delighting playfully in the images of farm life and doing so with exactitude and unadorned, compressed language:

In reading the taut, lovely poems in this collection, one gets the sense that the land of his native Minnesota serves as a kind of nourishment for Walsh in the same way the Lake District compelled Wordsworth’s meditations more than two hundred years ago. There’s precious little to fault in The Dirt Riddles, though I must admit the title is slightly misleading: Unlike a good portion of contemporary verse, the poems in this book are not riddles at all. They are truths, both celebratory and at times sinister, carved intricately from the stuff at hand—from “Cord, hinge, tube, and bone,” and from “mud, apples, milk.” Perhaps Michael Walsh learned the intense patience and attention he gives to his work from the dairy farm of his youth, for his poems are as palpable, as rich a thing as milk itself. And he describes those milkings:

Walsh has left us with this testament of a life spent tending the land, and without a tinge of pretense or resentment. It’s been a few years since the publication of The Dirt Riddles, but I for one hope that Walsh is hard at work on his second book. Though I trust poems this subtle and deceptively simple take a good deal of time to write, I also know that there are not enough collections like this one out there—books that seek a much larger audience by daring to write accessibly about everyday life, repaying our patient reading with the pleasures of music and the kindness of clarity.

Reviewed by James Crews

I highly recommend getting a hold of Bruce Snider’s latest collection of poems, Paradise, Indiana and reading it back-to-back with his first book, the Felix Pollak Prize-winning The Year We Studied Women, published in 2003 by the University of Wisconsin Press. These two volumes are not only inextricably linked in both place and subject matter; they are also each, in their own ways, an essential addition to any collection of LGBT literature. That said, Snider’s poems are also just plain good. Though his more playful debut sticks to childhood for the most part, exploring what it means to grow up gay (and simply to grow up), his second book—winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize—takes up an adolescence spent in the open landscapes of Indiana (“I could feel/the sky crush down on me . . .”). Paradise, Indiana also fearlessly recounts the speaker’s troubled romance with his cousin, Nick, who later commits suicide. But if the subject matter sounds too heavy, not to worry: Snider is a master of the quiet moment, his memory-driven narratives slowly unfolding until the accumulation becomes a kind of redemption, which is what all poetry should aspire to. In “The Girlfriend,” Snider captures just how hard it was to watch Nick’s girlfriend publicly grieve when the speaker knew him far more intimately; he closes the poem like this, looking toward nature to articulate his own unspoken grief:

After the rains,
tent caterpillars will fill the trees like snow.
Webbed and resinous, they’ll cover
entire limbs, multiplying as they feed,
a strange white silence
even kerosene can’t kill.

So much of Paradise (and so much of life) is about those “strange white silences” we can’t get rid of, and it is these silences, which keep the speaker and Nick from being able to name openly the desire that must have consumed them. This gorgeous book is, of course, an extended elegy, yet it begs the question: How does one memorialize a love whose memory many would rather keep suppressed? The poems themselves are the answer as they ponder what those left living in the aftermath of any tragedy must do to make some fractured sense of it all. But poetry—as Snider well knows—is, at best, a flawed copy of the real, and so he makes do, admitting over and over to the limits of elegy and of writing itself, especially when it comes to describing such a life-altering event, or the place one once called home. In “Heat Lightning Over Tunker,” he writes as always with stark honesty:

. . . Here the dead
know better than to ask for much:
mound of dirt, pine box. On the shore
there’s just another old fishing boat,
but it’s more than enough to cross.

Reading this book, I thought of the famous question posed to Russian poet Anna Akhmatova by a woman who recognized her, standing in the long lines outside the prison to leave packages for loved ones rounded up during Stalin’s purges. “Can you describe this?” the woman asks. Akhmatova replies: “I can.” The stakes may not be quite the same, but in our country, at this time, young men still risk their lives by acting on urges that feel all too natural, by coming out to families and friends who may shun them (or worse) for doing so. One has only to have been paying attention to the news the last few years for evidence of the suicides of several gay teens that prompted sex columnist Dan Savage and his partner Terry Miller to start the It Gets Better Project, which shares testimonials to help show young LGBT people see that life might not always be so harrowing. In Savage’s September 2010 column for The Stranger in which he declares his intention to start the project, he writes about Billy Lucas, a teenager who hanged himself in Greensburg, Indiana after enduring severe bullying. Savage says, “Nine out of 10 gay teenagers experience bullying and harassment at school, and gay teens are four times likelier to attempt suicide. Many LGBT kids who do kill themselves live in rural areas, exurbs, and suburban areas, places with no gay organizations or services for queer kids.” Bruce Snider, in Paradise, Indiana, is doing his part. He has at last told his story, describing what must have resisted description for years. How does one ridge back from memory such an unlikely love? The poem “Parts” finds the speaker and Nick during one of the many cautiously tender moments they share throughout the book:

In the back of that car, all elbows
and mouths, we knew nothing

corrupts like happiness. We ducked
deeper into ripped seats, two boys

in the shadow of cottonwoods . . .

Though Snider shows us pockets in this rural landscape where a young gay man might have escaped, it’s as if the oppressive land itself is always waiting to take over and reassert itself again. “Closing the Gay Bar Outside Gas City” gives us what was once a refuge, but has now been abandoned, reclaimed by nature:

Even the magpies, locked in some
blood-sleep, stir in the eaves as if
to speak of patience and regret. Stains
from tossed eggs mar the sides, dents
from stones pitched through windows
boarded up where FAG and AIDS
are sprayed in flaking paint along
the front . . .

What is remembered desire, if not “some blood sleep”? Another poem, “Cruising the Rest Stop on Route 9” makes evident another risky escape for this speaker:

You lean against the sink, its faucet
dripping, trying to form a word, night
stalled between hand and zipper.

You know a man on his knees
can read the scored tile, torque of
his mouth filled with night and the marsh
fields’ dampness . . .

I hope Paradise, Indiana gains a wider readership than books of poetry usually do, if only to show those who make their lives in rural and isolated areas that there are writers committed to speaking for the voiceless, telling the necessary stories. It’s gratifying that Bruce Snider dwells in the past without so much as a hint of nostalgia, that he offers up both the beauty and devastation of small-town Indiana where, he tells us, “Even the buckeyes I picked/along the dirt road opened to soft gray meant, so much hidden/where you’d least expect it . . .” Snider has unearthed much in this volume, and it reads like a late torch-song (without the sentiment) for a speaker’s first love and the land that shaped him.

by James Crews

Henri Cole’s Touch is a dark but redemptive book. These poems—many of them sonnets—strike an elegiac, confessional tone as Cole reconstructs his personal history through memory, dreams and observations of the ordinary in the natural world. Touch builds upon the mastery already in full display in earlier collections that include the excellent Blackbird and Wolf (FSG, 2007) and Middle Earth (FSG, 2003) which received the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Cole has always turned toward nature for clues to our sometimes inexplicable emotions and instincts, but one admires the straightforwardness and simplicity employed often with heartbreaking accuracy in this new book, much of which chronicles his mother’s death. The following passage from “Sunflower” gives us an intact moment of communion between son and mother:

. . . “Nature
is always expressing something human,”
mother commented, her mouth twisting,
as I plucked whiskers from around it.
“Yes. No. Please.” Tenderness was not yet dust.
Mother sat up, rubbed her eyes drowsily, her breaths
like breakers, the living man the beach.

Cole seems most at ease when speaking of the body and does not shy away from depicting its luridness, or the violence visited upon it as in “Mosquito Mother”:

. . . Then I felt your subtle knife touching me,
as if I were just some part of the scenery, and we sat
like that a long time, your moist red crown all shiny,
as if from effusions: milk, blood, tears, urine, semen.

In this poet’s hands, even a mosquito bite can become almost romantic—and unquestionably sexual—because he knows, as insignificant as we humans are to nature and time itself, our bodies still follow the laws of nature. In Touch, Cole employs his characteristically concise line to get at the brokenness and silences that fill our lives. Here, just after his mother’s passing, he describes a fresh snowfall:

like linen unfolded
conjuring the domestic—
forces us inward
into fraught territories
of self and family,

instead of out into waves
at the beach or furrows
in the bronzing garden.
Fold one thousand
paper cranes at the kitchen table,

and the spirits will cure you,
a friend once advised . . .

These “fraught territories”—the zones between moments of beauty and moments of loss, perhaps—are the borderlands these poems map out for us. And when the collection moves into recounting the loss of a lover to addiction, we sense Cole’s powerlessness even as he gives in to the passion few among us can control. In “One Animal,” we hear the speaker uselessly cautioning himself:

And do not think—touching his hair,
licking, sucking, and being sucked in the same
instant, no longer lonely—that you
are two animals perfect as one.

The temptation, of course, is to justify all of our wildest desires and claim that we are simply following instinct. But humans, Cole suggests, with our flawed and distractible minds and self-inflicted addictions, fail as true animals again and again. We think too much; we cause ourselves too much needless suffering. As he says in “Self-Portrait with Addict”:

You won’t come to bed because you’re
doing amphetamines again. There’s no animal
that sleep-deprives itself like the human.
Please, I say, repeating the monosyllable.

Some readers might wonder how a speaker so seemingly self-aware could surrender to such a clearly destructive love, but Cole’s defense rests with each poem (“a little mirror to mull over/the question ‘Who am I and why?’”) in which he is (as we all are) “hunting the elusive laughing monster of contentment.” Though his work must necessitate an intense solitude and ascetic nature, Cole nevertheless confesses: “I want to be real, to think, to live.” Indeed, his poems reflect a tightly controlled extravagance that does not seek to offer us solace or comfort; we sense instead that he hopes to unsettle readers—and himself most of all—in order to better understand his place in a confusing world. And he knows that “to be real” is to live a life of regret and error just like everybody else, so that “the art of life/becomes, mostly,/the art of avoiding pain.” His work thus attests to what our self-inflicted suffering can teach us.

The sheer pleasure Henri Cole seems to take in the act of writing—that is, giving voice and form to the forces of human emotion—mitigates much of the sadness that colors Touch. His honesty and awareness allow him to speak as if from a still point the truth we all seek:

. . . But writing this now, my hand is warm.
The character I call Myself isn’t lustful, heavy,
melancholic. It’s as if emotions are no longer bodied.
Eros isn’t ripping through darkness. It’s as if I’m
a boy again, observing the births of two baby lambs.
The world has just come into existence.

Cole is always reaching for a deeper understanding of the world through poems that begin with his immediate surroundings but soon enough move into one of those “fraught territories.” Many of these pieces have little to do with the autobiographical, yet they resonate all the more. Take, for instance, the closing lines of “Hens”:

. . . There’s a way the wounded
light up a dark rectangular space. Suffering becomes
the universal theme. Too soft, and you’ll be squeezed;
too hard, and you’ll be broken. Even a hen knows this,
posing on a manure pile, her body a stab of gold.

As with much of Cole’s past work, these poems too shine with a welcome humility, which is that of the poet bowing down to the portion of the mystery he’s doing his best to bring to light. “Hairy Spider” reminds us of the insignificance of our daily joys and pains as the speaker muses:

. . . Can she see if I am climbing,
I wonder, or kneeling down here on the dock, day after day,
when it’s time for reading and writing again, and a hairy spider—
ingenious, bashful, insolent, laborious, patient—observes
a man no different than a lily, a worm, a clod of clay?

Touch brims with more than just observations, however; this collection fashions a language, much-needed in our tight-lipped culture, to speak of the useless divisions between love and grief, body and mind, animal and human. Yet again, Cole has unearthed the many fears and failings we all share, and as a result, this book is as intimate as “the sound of someone else breathing” just next to us.

Reviewed by James Crews

Heather Dubrow’s first collection of poetry, Forms and Hollows, opens with an extended elegy for her mother and makes use of a dizzying range of poetic forms—everything from sonnets and villanelles to a canzone and ghazal. These are some of the forms, of course, indicated by the title of her book, but their masterful use throughout suggests a speaker’s attempt to reign in and make sense of the chaos of emotions and a memory that is often enough for all of us “a noisy houseguest.”

Dubrow is one of those virtuosos we envy; she began her distinguished career as a scholar and author of six books of widely acclaimed criticism, the most recent of which is The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England (Johns Hopkins, 2011). Nonetheless, Forms and Hollows marks a generous and fiercely aware poetic intelligence, especially apparent in the aforementioned eight-part elegy that ushers us into her world. So begins the speaker’s interrogation of a life that once brought so much comfort:

Gangs of what-ifs cast shadows on white walls:
Sure, that pain may be gas, but it’s so near
where the tumor was. There’s the doctor in the hall—
Nervous questions. Cheerful answers. Yet doubts still rise.
For our doctors wear crisply ironed white lies.

As she points out over and over, our bodies betray us. The medical establishment can offer no answers, only “white lies.” It is these truths that keep us appreciative of Dubrow’s gentle touch, evident in poems like “Mourning in November,” which shows one of those the moments we have all experienced and perhaps faced alone:

Chattering into midnight,
I stockpile bromides:
Hard and shiny as acorns.

Though the prospect of disruption (“the baby teeth of another disaster/biding its time”) seems to lurk beneath even the most joyful of these poems, the many moments of humor and surprise shed light wherever darkness might collect too thickly. Taking us with her to Our Lady of Murano in Venice, to Sydney, Australia or La Rue Daguerre in Paris, Dubrow shows off an ability not just to catalogue what she sees, but also to filter it through a sensibility that is (refreshingly) more than willing to delight her readers and even (God forbid) make us crack a smile. Consider these lines from “Rue Daguerre, Paris”:

But if we navigate among
the detritus of dogs and ironies,
eyes neither wide nor more lidded than they should be,
Paris awakens us
to choruses
sung by flowerpots on balconies
and arias
by that alpha male of wines,
the Burgundy.

Essential to any first volume of poetry (or any good book, for that matter) is the crafting of a voice readers won’t mind accompanying for a while. And lucky for us, whether she’s talking about things as seemingly plain as cheese, spices or bread, Dubrow manages to surprise with her constant wit as in the last lines of “Homemade Bread: A Baker’s Dozen”:

The joy of kneaded bread:
Only one part of a man’s body
is so elastic,
so smooth,
so happy to be touched.

Forms and Hollows is also impeccably arranged, with one poem often flowing seamlessly into the next. Not enough poets these days pay that kind of careful attention to continuity or to the patient shaping of metaphor—yet another area in which this work exhibits its immense playfulness. In “Regret: A User’s Guide,” she returns to her central theme (what we hold onto, what keeps its hold over us):

Some memories scamper:
Walt Disney squirrels
with those adorable tails . . .

these rodents of mine
dine on the wires,
chew through dear neurons . . .

It is the unquiet mind, Dubrow suggests, that often intercedes to upend our best intentions, especially on those dark mornings when we waken, unable to fall back asleep and lie there, composing our endless to-do lists as if to stave off the pain of the past and the nagging doubts that come to disturb the present moment. We want to rise and be productive,

But rain insists,
memories siren the dark,
yesterday stains all lists.
And photos slide out of their albums
and stalk up the steps,
as tight with fury as a Van Gogh cypress.

“Divorce Papers,” the long poem that rounds out the collection, continues this meditation on the transience of love and its imprint on us, while also hinting of the joys to come with a new partner. Dubrow recollects with vividness and honesty the betrayal of a marriage she once expected to be an “Eden”:

Each snowfall celebrated
with ritualistic snow walks,
covering us
with melted stars.

Not knowing the borders
surrounding this garden
would sprout blades of knives
at the first sign of spring.

“The divorced meet each other,” she tells us, “in the hollows of monuments.” And perhaps those “monuments” she means are the places in the mind, worn smooth by time and use, where we cannot escape the memories, fears and ghosts we wish were “well bred enough to know they needed an invitation.” But no matter how long we have tried to forget our past lives, they always return to haunt even our most carefree days. The best we can do, Dubrow counsels in the excellent Forms and Hollows, is to become “immune to frostbite,” to make peace with whatever specters decide to show up and to delight in the small moments between their dispiriting appearances.

Reviewed by James Crews

Every once in a while a book of poetry will fall into your hands and—perhaps not expecting much at first—you read it in one sitting, breathing a sigh of relief that you have discovered a new poet (new to you, at least) whose work actually speaks to you. Such was the case for me with Connie Wanek’s aptly titled On Speaking Terms, published a few years ago by Copper Canyon Press. Wanek, a retired librarian from Duluth, Minnesota and 2006 Witter Bynner Fellow, has not garnered as much attention as she should for this lovely book. And she will likely be called a regionalist, that label most reviled by many writers. It’s true her settings hew close to the frigid landscapes of the Upper Midwest, but she sees these places, these lakes and rivers, so keenly that her poems trigger deep insights into nature, offering us a new way to look at our relations to the world. At a time when few poets explore the ordinary, Wanek gently reminds us what’s possible with simple, straightforward talk. In “A Sighting,” she writes of the owl spotted during a hike:

He must have just eaten
something that had, itself, just eaten.
Finally he crossed the swamp and vanished
as into a new day, hours before us,

and we stood near the chest-high reeds,
our feet sinking, and felt
we’d been dropped suddenly from midair
back into our lives.

Wanek is a master of recording the quiet moments—what Virginia Woolf called “moments of being”—but a streak of healthy playfulness also wends its way through many of the poems even when she’s tackling more serious subject matter. “The Death of My Father” opens unexpectedly:

He died at different times in different places.
In Wales he died tomorrow,
which doesn’t mean his death was preventable.
It had been coming for years,
crossing the ocean, the desert, pausing often,
moving like water or wind,
here turned aside by a stone,
then hurried where the way was clear.

Wanek’s stanzas are elegant yet spare rooms we step willingly into, surprised by what we find there, as in “Pickles,” which begins with the line: “I don’t need to say what they look like, do I?” “Confessional Poem” gives us a speaker’s experience as a girl, sharing her “white lies” with the priest in a literal confessional, but the poem soon takes a wonderful turn as she confides the things she wishes she could have confessed:

a silk cuff missing its button,
sheer stockings coiled on the floor,
shoes with heels like wineglass stems—
the hypnotic black-and-white images of film noir,
wherein all eyes followed a bad star
with uncontrollable longing.

Critics often sound poetry’s death-knell, citing a shrinking, almost non-existent audience and the ever-insular, esoteric nature of today’s verse. Surprise, surprise: Most people would read about lives like their own—what John Updike famously called “the human news.” Maybe this is why Wanek’s poems (especially when read in winter) feel like such a balm to me; in “First Snow,” for instance, she lets us join in on the fun as she performs a lighthearted re-imagination of Genesis:

. . . it was Eve who made
the first snowman, her second sin, and she laughed
as she rolled up the wet white carpet
and lifted the wee head into place.

Some will no doubt say that the poems in On Speaking Terms are too simple, that poetry should not be so relatable and pleasurable. They may find off-putting her insistence on turning her gaze toward jelly beans, Scrabble, popcorn and coloring books. These critics will certainly object to her reverence for the everyday. But what else is there? For those poets who aspire toward a wider audience—and for all her quiet ways, Connie Wanek is one of them—and for those who seek to bring the democratic joys of good poetry to readers outside of the academy, these poems are prime examples of the music always available to us when we can simply stop and pay attention. And if we take a look at the work of former U.S. Poet Laureates, or former Nobel Prize winners like Tomas Tranströmer, we see that it is their unique ability to make the quotidian seem suddenly extraordinary that endears them to readers worldwide and renders their work enduring.

In “White Roads,” we begin to understand perhaps how Wanek trained herself in her youth to see the muted beauty of a single place:

I seldom left my world then,
and little entered it. Too much was close at hand
to wonder what became of the sun all night,
the stars all day.
Or where the snow went that lay
so deep upon the roads.

May there be more so-called “regional poets,” patient enough to bring us books we can care about, poems that care enough about us as an audience to say clearly what they mean, to show us a full world, as Connie Wanek’s On Speaking Terms does, without flourish or pretension.

The Salt Ecstasies

Reviewed by James Crews

James L. White’s The Salt Ecstasies, recently re-issued by Graywolf Press for their wonderful new RE/VIEW Series, edited by Mark Doty, is more than just a gay classic; it’s a rich and rare book that has been out-of-print and difficult to find for far too long. I can still remember the day I received my copy in the mail after an exhaustive online search, how I tore open the envelope to find the plain blue and black collection of poems that, more than anything I had read up to that point, made me want to be a poet. White’s work came at just the right time for me: I knew almost no other gay men, let alone gay male poets, having grown up in a small town in the Midwest (not unlike White himself). The sad yet ecstatic tone he struck so delicately in his work still rings true all these years later when writers like Mary Jo Bang and Tracy K. Smith are still testing the durability of elegy and its ability to console. White never offers easy answers, but in his frank nostalgia for the messiness of a life lived to its fullest; in his dwelling on nostalgia, sex and the failures of love, he lends us comfort. He was never afraid to be fully human.

Reading the prose poem, “An Ordinary Composure,” which opens the book, felt like finding my “tribe” at last:

My people and I lean against great medical buildings with news of our predicted death, and give up mostly between one and three in the morning, never finding space large enough for a true departure, so our eyes gaze earthward, wanting to say something simple as the meal’s too small: I want more.

It’s difficult to describe or even quote from a James L. White poem because they plow forward, turn corners, veer off just to the edges of sentimentality before whipping us right back to the honest, concrete images that are his currency—“a cold practice room above the city,” or “the early bus to Laurel.”  Part of the appeal of this work (and why it’s held up so well) is its unabashedness in showing the ways most of us actually live. He remains perhaps one of the few gay poets who can speak for the average, working class man who just happens to prefer sleeping with other men, who tells his lover “wearing a coat that will not last the year,/ I love you completely as salt.” As Doty points out in his excellent introduction to the collection, especially in the early 1980s, when White was writing, there were two kinds of gay poets: those “which foregrounded sexual life” to the exclusion of everything else; and those who “were all about style, a high-gloss, witty surface that signified—through its modes of joking, its interest in the world of high art, its elegantly arcane subjects, and its intensely wrought formality.” But The Salt Ecstasies proves that beauty and rawness need not be mutually exclusive, especially in pieces like “Making Love to Myself”:

When I do it, I remember how it was with us.
Then my hands remember too,
and you’re with me again, just the way it was . . .

I’d breathe out long and say,
‘Hi Jess, you tired baby?’
You’d say not so bad and rub my belly,
not after me really, just being sweet,
and I always thought I’d die a little
because you smelt like burnt leaves or woodsmoke.

Even while portraying loss after loss—the words “salt” and “blue” recur over and over in these poems—White finds catharsis in the act of memory, in getting the past down on the page. And there is a quiet power, he argues, even in losing the ongoing battle with desire, with “flesh.” It might be a “stifling contract,” but it’s one he signs with abandon, even if only in the mind:

Some farm kid presses against my leg.
I look at the long backs of men in the fields
and doze to dream you’re going through me
like winter bone, your logs of arms pushing
me down into some stifling contract with flesh
until I break free for air.

The “Autobiographical Fragment” and two additional poems that Doty culled from White’s personal papers specifically for this re-issued volume certainly stand as valuable additions to the abbreviated oeuvre of a poet who died before his finest book was ever published. One reads these never-before-seen pieces with interest, of course, but the “Autobiographical Fragment” is excerpted from the poet’s journals, and it’s easy to imagine him mortified that readers were combing his private thoughts, never meant to be seen by eyes other than his own. At one point he confesses, “I’ve spent a large part of my life seeking every conceivable act with men, but somewhere in my stomach it all says it was never the right man,” and in another passage says, “Even to say villain of my father is easy enough, that he was a bastard, that I was his bastard . . . but to say that he was a part of my loneliness and I must have been a living part of his despair is to say it more clearly.” White was obviously self-aware, cognizant of how the past had informed his life and perhaps much of his work. Nonetheless, I wonder who really benefits from reading stuff like this, as it comes to feel voyeuristic at best and can begin to color how we read the work.

Still, re-examining the scant legacy James L. White left behind is part and parcel of our human urge to speculate: What might have been if he had lived even a few years more? What even greater poems might he have written? In the last poem of The Salt Ecstasies, “Naming,” the speaker begs his mother:

Old woman, don’t die.
Take me to your first words again,
to say there are plants that live as people,
that certain animals carry dreams,
that the hawk is itself where the canyon drops to air.

And the mother replies, “ ‘Look son, another flower called going away, and this/ is called too soon.’” It is as though, with those last words, White had anticipated what readers would be saying of him and his poems—too soon—nearly thirty years after this watershed book was first published. Contemporary readers should feel grateful to Mr. Doty and Graywolf Press for choosing to bring this collection to light once again. New generations will surely continue to appreciate James L. White’s strange, sad and transcendent poems for decades to come.

reviewed by James Crews

In his 2011 May Swenson Award-winning first book, About the Dead, Travis Mossotti sketches a larger-than-life canvas for his readers, taking us from Van Gogh’s home in Arles, France to Aynor, South Carolina, to the Meramec River in “backwoods” Sullivan, Missouri and far beyond. It’s no surprise that Garrison Keillor culled Mossotti’s manuscript from hundreds of other entries, for About the Dead is nothing if not distinctly American; see, for instance the “box cars,” “fencerows,” “sweet flag,” and “fried okra.” Follow the speaker and his cast of hard-luck characters as they veer toward the realization at the heart of each poem in this collection: “there is no other life but this.” Grief—from a father’s death, we guess—finds its way into many of these poems and is especially palpable in the book’s long opening piece, “Decampment” (also a haunting animated short adapted by the poet’s brother, Josh). This poem signals immediately there will be no refuge in the sterile lyric, no nod to safety in this collection. Mossotti is betting everything he has and raising the stakes. “It’s No Secret,” which shows this poet at his unsentimental best, finds a speaker trapped in an airport, confessing:

 . . . I wish I could tell the girl
with pigtails and wings for arms
that we’re all secretly waiting
for the moment our bodies unbuckle
from the ground and rise into blue . . .

True, but Mossotti can’t let it go at that—he’s come by too much knowledge the hard way, and so he has to drag us back down to earth:

. . . I imagine that, like me, one day
she will find her father gripping
the armrest of the red sofa, eyes
like white marbles cut in half,
scotch melted into water on a coaster.

“Eyes/like white marbles cut in half” captures the image of the silent, withdrawn father—which is all fathers, we realize, at some point. And so many of these poems dwell in that space of clarity where innocence—however much we had to begin with—is forever replaced by hard knowing. The poet’s no victim, though; he’s just after the plain-spoken truth, often delivered in sucker-punch lines that leave us reeling. “The one who hangs on the longest dies twice,” he tells us at the end of “Barber.”

Unlike so many books of poems published these days, About the Dead tracks real things and real people struggling through their lives. It is unabashedly narrative but is also at times funny, shifting, undaunted by the challenge of telling a good story or constructing the flawless moment. Mossotti revels in the daily strangenesses that show up at our doorsteps and moves from a night at the Red Roof Inn “reeking from the awful, / yellow liver of the last trucker / who slept here,” to the “breaking news” of “a pastor sermonizing Nietzsche / burst into flame.” He wants us to smile with him too, when he declares, “So I married the daughter of a police captain,” in spite of “one flagrant / violation of order and decency after another.” And in “The Funhouse of Mirth,” like a carnival barker he’s articulating his own poetics (though he’d never use that word) but warning us at the same time:

. . . If there’s a storyline here it spirals
like a tourniquet and only has room for two strangers
waving pistols from the Pyrenees to a truckstop waitress
in Kansas . . .

Mossotti is always letting us in on his project, acknowledging and half-apologizing— unnecessarily, one might add—for the picaresque quality of his narratives. One turns to poems like these because we sense what fun the poet had actually getting them on the page, and as Keillor points out in his fine introduction to the collection, any slow, pleasurable “climb” through this book will reward us tenfold, leading “to a magnificent view,” and perhaps a better understanding of ourselves.

It might have been the reference to Paris and the Catacombs in the book’s title poem (“bones—/stacked so neatly”), or the young couple the speaker sees “fucking/ on Jim Morrison’s grave,” but as I read About the Dead, I kept thinking of James Baldwin’s novel, Giovanni’s Room, the words of one character seeming especially apt:

You have never loved anyone, I am sure you never will! You love your purity, you love your mirror . . . You want to be clean. You think you came here covered in soap—and you think you will go out covered with soap—and you do not want to stink, not even for five minutes in the meantime.

Travis Mossotti’s poems bring us more deeply into our humanness but with tenderness for this “soft, dysfunctional, waiting earth” on which we’re all doing our best. “Take off your shoes, please,” he says, but we know it’s not so things stay clean; he wants us to kick back and enjoy this wonder-fueled roadtrip. And don’t trust him either when he says, “This house isn’t much to look at.”

Crack open About the Dead to just about any page and start reading these lasting, risky, rollicking poems.

You won’t want to stop.

Reviewed by James Crews

In her now-classic book of essays on the craft of poetry, Nine Gates, Jane Hirshfield writes, “Solitude, whether endured or embraced is a necessary gateway to original thought: only a writer who fears neither abandonment nor self-presence can write without distortion.” As one might expect from a longtime student of zen, Hirshfield’s latest collection, Come, Thief, rings with a fearless clarity and an attention to language that never wavers. She’s always pursued both depth and simplicity in her previous volumes, which include Given Sugar, Given Salt (2001) and After (2006), and though the poems of Come, Thief again ask for our patience, they repay it more than ever with work that marries the abstract with the concrete: “Let reason flow like water around a stone, the stone remains,” she tells us in one of her koan-like lines, suggesting “reason” has little place in her work and in our lives. It’s the mystery she’s after.

Hirshfield is thus most compelled by the spaces between things, the unexpected gaps between thoughts or the too-often unacknowledged world beneath the world in which we live. “Under each station of the real/another glimmers,” she says in “If Truth Is the Lure, Humans Are the Fishes,” and we can easily agree with both first line and title, for it is, after all, the pursuit of truth and beauty that often brings us to poetry in the first place. Always peering beneath “the stations of the real,” she is never didactic, confessing instead: “I make these words for what they can’t replace.” Seeking to honor the ineffable because she has no choice, she also owns up to the failures inherent in any attempt to capture the truth, since words can never actually “replace” the actual things they do their best to describe.

Speaking of that slimmest window between decision and action, she says:

The thorax of an ant is not as narrow.
The green coat on old copper weighs more.
Yet something slips through it—
looks around,
sets out in the new direction, for other lands.

The best writers linger over every word, each line break and segue from image to image; Hirshfield is clearly one of our most precise, careful poets. And Come, Thief, with its flawless construction, is the kind of book that can inhabit you, can even begin to color how you see the particulars of the world (“Coffee cups, olives, cheeses,/ hunger, sorrow, fears”). These poems wear a kind of detached delight on their sleeves. “So it was,” Hirshfield tells us in “First Light Edging Cirrus”:

when love slipped inside us.
It looked out face to face in every direction.
Then it was inside the tree, the rock, the cloud.

The speaker seems to have fallen in love again, but it is the spiritual life she mostly interrogates here—that ephemeral “thing” that has filled us, she suggests, since the beginning. And because Hirshfield is just as concerned with human emotion as she is with the transitory, Come, Thief never veers too far toward the sentimental or facile. It is with humor and seriousness both that the poet makes use of the temporariness she sees in almost everything. “Perishable, It Said” finds its speaker looking:

now at the back of each hand,
now inside the knees,
now turning over each foot to look at the sole.

Then at the leaves of the young tomato plants,
then at the arguing jays . . .

Searching for the “date to be used by,” she’s also rebelling against the way we often take note of ruin and approach the idea of death: we look first outside of ourselves. This speaker, however, begins by examining the places on her own body as if for the telltale ink stamped there, for some sign when she might “expire.” The last stanza thus registers the surprise we find so often throughout this book:

How suddenly then
the strange happiness took me,
like a man with strong hands and strong mouth
inside that hour with its perishing perfumes and clashings.

As Hirshfield well knows, it is in moments of physical passion and connection that we are most vulnerable, “perishable,” most keenly aware of our own mortality, even as the body wants to keep those “strong hands and strong mouth” forever alive. Though she writes with assuredness, the impetus of her work is really a deep ambivalence, the expression of uncertainty and groundlessness, which are of course hallmarks of many Buddhist teachings. Maybe her “strange happiness” at observing the coming and going of things makes this book such a slow pleasure. “Sheep” manages, for instance, to be both devastating and heartening, a delicate balance:

A black-faced sheep
looks back out at you as you pass
and your heart is startled
as if by the shadow
of someone once loved.

Neither comforted by this
nor made lonely.

In so many places too, she seems to be talking about her own work. Referring to the futility of translation (and thereby of writing) as well as the uselessness of clinging to anything, she asks us:

But what is the point of preserving the bell
if to do so it must be filled with concrete or wax?
A body prepared for travel but not for singing.

What is the point of “preserving” a body or that body’s perceptions? Hirshfield is constantly acknowledging the impossibility of immortality even as her poems seem to seek it.

Ultimately, one cannot help but admire a poet whose honest work asks us to pause and think, to marvel at the small delights of this world, while also questioning the nature of its existence. Come, Thief—though heady—is an invitation, “the path to the doorway,” as she puts it in the title poem, even if we must unlock that door ourselves. At each turn in this exquisite book, it’s worth it.

Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. $23.00 hardcover.

Reviewed by James Crews

 
The poet Carl Phillips must love the sea, standing “where the land ends no differently/ than it’s ever had to.” I don’t think he’d ever simply say “on the beach.” He loves not just the physical and emotional spaces between lovers, but also those spaces between the body and what might call the self for lack of a better word. These spaces show up constantly in the poems of his new collection, Double Shadow, which seem to yearn toward the light of a new love his speaker can never quite trust, wanting instead the “regretlessness” that blesses others so easily. If we read his last book, Speak Low, as chronicling the destruction of a relationship, Double Shadow still suffers from the aftershocks of such a disruption, many of the pieces still up in the air, scattered on the ground, having not quite settled in place.

Whether looking at the sky, the sea, or standing alone in a field—one of Phillips’ favorite settings—we’re never quite sure where we are exactly, and this poet likes it like that. He cannot help disturbing the still waters with questions like this one in “Sky Coming Forward”:

. . . What if, between this one and the one
we hoped for, there’s a third life, taking its own
slow, dreamlike hold, even now—blooming, in spite of us?

This book explores that “third life” at every turn, just as his previous books have, obsessed with dream and the illusory nature of emotions and real things. Description fails him constantly, and it’s no surprise then that the idea of “blindness” should figure greatly in Double Shadow, the world as unsee-able as the inner lives of humans, “blindness not at all/ a gift to be held to the chest.” But if it is not a gift, what is it? Is it a curse, a burden? Phillips wants us to wonder. This poet almost always turns a blind eye to those images that might help us to see more clearly, and we can safely assume this is a very conscious choice he’s made since he tells us, “they are not the same—inability, / unwillingness.” We see a poet rejecting specificity, striving for something more universal or perhaps classical: an injured man hauled in a cart along the sea, several scenes of lions having devoured their prey. In this way, like mood rings made of some more precious metal (“nostalgia; gold”), these poems give back whatever we ourselves bring to them. They are as generous as the “wildering field” that recurs, a “space of hunger,” or as the opening poem “First Night at Sea” says, “a dark where was a brightness, a bright where dark.” The poems are both at the same time—light and dark. It’s as if his language, its meanings, are ever-waving and wavering like blades of sea grass displacing themselves. Though Mark Doty was talking about Rilke’s Duino Elegies when he said it, I’d say the same assessment applies: “Like all great poems, they simply seem to rewrite themselves before you as you read. Their capacity to delight and provoke does not weary with time.” If we find difficulty in pinning down some of these pieces, it is because Carl Phillips is reaching for that same timelessness.

Indeed, he has a talent for equating abstractions of love and erotic life with what he finds around him—horses, weak starlight, a lover—but the most frustrating thing about reading Phillips is that the equations (like description, like language) fail; they are never quite exact. He tells us what things were not or almost were much more often than he offers clear definitions. Those readers not willing to go along with this might call it caginess, and he does have a seeming disdain for concrete, actual images. The aforementioned “Continuous Until We Stop” finds the poet circling the poems sole image—that ubiquitous field—but any sense of solid ground unravels as he describes “the zone of tragedy–transition” as:

when the body surrenders to risk, that moment
when an unwillingness to refuse can seem

no different from an ability to,
though they are not the same—inability,
unwillingness.

He might have stopped there on a note of authority, but goes on, “To have said otherwise / doesn’t make it true, or even make it count / as true. Yes but what does the truth matter now, I whispered.” These lines demand a lot of even a sympathetic reader, since the act of parsing just what he means entails pausing and imagining the negation of the previous lines, only to be told that that negation “doesn’t make it true, or even make it count as true.” In the end, the speaker himself is asking—a lover, himself, us, the “almost night”—”What does the truth matter now.” Because uncertainty is his ongoing project, Phillips consistently rejects what others might call “truth” as transitory, implying that in this in-between place perhaps some “third” truth is “blooming” just beyond our human grasp and thus out of the reach of every reader and the author as well. For those who enjoy a test of patience, this poet provokes.

One senses, however, an aching in the poems of this new book, a need to break free from the subjects of “risk” and “surrender,” which we have so often visited in his past work. Perhaps some of the new pieces in Double Shadow mark the same kind of shift that occurred with Riding Westward (his best book yet), when he moved beyond some of the shorter, “muscular” and “athletic” lines in favor of what still reads like fuller, more robust poetry than he’d been writing before. Phillips is never afraid to question himself and his own strategies, and one hopes that some of that healthy interrogation will continue in the next books as—in that grasping for timelessness—many of these pieces founder. This is most evident in “Clear, Cloudless” when the speaker tells us,

 . . . I wear on my head a crown
of feathers—among which, sure, I have had
my favorites. Fear, though, is the bluest feather,
and it is easily the bluest feather the wind loves most.

Though those last lines ring so true, the poem itself is a bit trapped by its own metaphors. It’s hard not to cringe when one imagines a grown man putting on “a crown/ of feathers,” out of any context in which that might otherwise make sense. But for the most part, there is little context in Phillips’ work. Such images are a part of his personal lexicon, but one wants to channel William Carlos Williams at times and chant, “Things! Things! More things!”

Another of Phillips’ signatures, the sudden italics of some voice speaking or something singing, has by now become a mere flourish, a kind of tic in each of the poems that distracts from their power. In “Of the Rippling Surface,” the italics show up as if out of nowhere—”Nothing was was nothing nothing was”—though we are then told “that’s the river singing,” not a little mysteriously. I could accept that, but there is something not quite genuine about the voice-in-italics which ushers in “The Shore” with the imperative, “Don’t be afraid—Don’t go—Passenger me back to / a land called neither Honeycomb nor Danger. Clearly, he’s exploring again the space that must exist between pleasure (“Honeycomb”) and risk (“Danger”), but the words don’t feel anything like what one lover might say to another. He suggests as the poem goes on that these lines are a “prayer,” but prayers are much simpler than this. They are more specific and in this case it’s hard to decipher what putting them in italics accomplishes for the poem, or for the many others with italics in this book.

Still, one hates to bash a poet for simply doing what he does best. Besides, there are still exquisite pieces in Double Shadow, which find beauty in this constant act of questioning. Phillips most often finds strength and tenderness when he speaks of the flowering of what one presumes is new love. “Night” comes to mind—it has been in this reader’s head for days—with its unforgettable last stanza:

. . . The restless choir
that any human life can be, sometimes, casts forth
all over again its double shadow: now risk, and now
faintheartedness—we’re not what
                                              either of us expected,
are we?—each one a form of disembodiment,
without the other.

Because “disembodiment” means both physical separation from the body as well as from all concrete form, Phillips implies that love, in spite of his distrust of its comforts, in spite of its inability (or “unwillingness”) to set free the speaker or the beloved—nevertheless helps harness us to the few things we can see clearly enough and feel confidently enough to put into words. Love grounds us, he says. In “Heaven and Earth,” which appeared in the Best American Poetry 2010 anthology, and whose title belies yet another in-betweenness, another kind of disembodiment, never shies from concreteness, though, and the poet moves between abstraction-and-question and the actual with his usual deftness:

What am I, that I should stand
so apart from my own happiness? The stars did
what they do, mostly: looked unbudging, transfixed,
like cattle asleep in a black pasture, all the restlessness
torn out of them, away, done with. I turn beneath them.

Phillips seems to crave “the rest of love,” but can never quite give up the “restlessness” of the search for it, except in fleeting moments, “as a horse in harness to what, inevitably, must break it.” Carl Phillips has tethered himself to a language all his own that attempts to illumine the space between what the body wants and the mind needs. With brutal honesty, he admits in “Civilization,” “even hunger / can become a space / to live in.” Phillips lives there, and we cannot blame him if he invites us, reluctantly, to join him.

Random House (2011) $24  (hardback)

Reviewed by James Crews

Billy Collins’ ninth collection of poetry pokes and prods the idea of mortality—the author’s as well as our own—more than in any of his previous books. This one opens with a watchful speaker standing, “before the joined grave of my parents,” he tells us, and—wait for it—asking them what they think of his new glasses. With this loaded image of spectacles and the pseudo-serious author photo in which Collins pensively chews on what we presume are those new glasses, he’s telling us he still sees the world in his characteristic playful way, but these days it’s with a greater sense of life’s transience that he sees the world. Indeed, Horoscopes brims with the wry humor and colloquial language that have won Collins such a wide readership—something that seldom happens for poets (unless you’re a rock-star-turned-poet like Jewel or Billy Corgan).

One of the best poems in Horoscopes for the Dead—an apt and catchy title if ever there was one—is “Memento Mori,” which begins,

It doesn’t take much to remind me
what a mayfly I am,
what a soap bubble floating over the children’s party.

Standing under the bones of a dinosaur
in a museum does the trick every time
or confronting in a vitrine a rock from the moon.

In this book, we see a speaker having fun with the realization that he too has become the dinosaur, an old man wandering among “the fans of palmettos, or the bright pink hibiscus” of the Florida he often mentions, musing in “The Flaneur,” “Who needs Europe?” and then watching “. . . as a boy flew by on a skateboard/ and I fell into a reverie on the folly of youth/ and the tender, distressing estrangement of my life.” But the poem, “Hangover,” is about as close as Collins gets to distress or anger as he decrees cantankerously that “every child who is playing Marco Polo/ in the swimming pool of this motel” should be required to read a thick biography of Marco Polo as well as several fine-printed histories of Venice and China. After that, he goes on,

each child would be quizzed
by me then executed by drowning
regardless how much they managed
to retain . . .

It’s not hard to see why Billy Collins, U.S. Poet Laureate from 2001-2003, is America’s bestselling, most popular poet; he writes poems just about anyone can read and appreciate. Though he weathers some criticism for employing many of the same strategies over and over in his poems, we can begrudge him a bit of redundancy if the formula is working—and of course, it still is. He looks out at the mutilated world with childlike fascination and clarity and makes music out of the quotidian, capturing universal experiences we perhaps didn’t realize someone else was also having. More often than not, the pieces in Horoscopes for the Dead are occasioned by a man sitting alone on a rock, or on a dock, and staring out at a calm lake. And there are the usual poems about his dog, as well as a poem in which he predictably likens himself to a mouse, “ducking like a culprit/ into an opening in a stone wall,” and there’s one poem—one can scarcely call it a poem—“Feedback,” which is all punch line and cutesiness:

The woman who wrote from Phoenix
after my reading there

to tell me they were all still talking about it

just wrote again
to tell me that they had stopped.

But Collins shows us time and again in poems like “Arithmetic” that he knows exactly what he’s up to, and he’s not afraid to repeat himself, letting his lines unfold slowly and tenderly for his readers so we too can see just where he’s headed:

I spend a little time nearly every day
on a gray wooden dock
on the edge of a wide lake, thinly curtained by reeds.

And if there is nothing on my mind
but the motion of the wavelets
and the high shape-shifting of clouds,

I look out at the whole picture
and divide the scene into what was here
five hundred years ago and what was not.

It becomes apparent once more in this book that Collins is not just writing for the appreciation of other poets (as writers often do these days); his project is a poetics for the guy in the pickup, the grand-dad in the La-Z-Boy, the mother reading on the plane. He said once in a lecture that he believes there are two kinds of poets—those like cats, who slink around corners and seem to need the attention of no one, and those like dogs, always staring up plaintively from the page, ever needful of the love and attention of their readers. It’s a pleasure to be in the gentle but capable hands of a master of the latter camp, as so many of these poems signal us right from the beginning to follow them for a walk out in the surprisingly fresh air. Consider the opening lines of “Riverside, California”:

I would have to say that the crown
resting on the head of my first acid trip
was the moment I went down on one knee
backstage at the Top Hat Lounge
and proposed marriage to all three Ikettes.

Even while cycling through a Florida cemetery, “wheeling past the headstones,” this poet finds ample reason for joy as he imagines the people buried there whose carved names are their only earthly remnants. “I wish I could take you all for a ride,” he says to them, letting us know in his not-so-sly way, he probably means the rest of us too. “Ride with me along these halls of the dead,” he says, “ . . . as some crows flap in the blue overhead/ and the spokes of my wheels catch the dazzling sun.”

Collins, like Ted Kooser and Stephen Dunn, captures those private, unhurried moments we so seldom take for ourselves in these technology-drenched, social networked times. In “Vocation,” he tells us his job will always have been

keeping an eye on things
whether they existed or not,
recumbent under the random stars.

In conjuring such a generous world on the page, Collins also creates a kind of comforting order and sense of play, which readers can use to resist the chaos otherwise pressing in around us. His critics will squawk that he’s too accessible, that the poems in Horoscopes for the Dead unfurl a bit too neatly and easily. But for this poet, that’s the point.