Archive for August, 2006

The Contracted World: New & More Selected Poems

Tuesday, August 29th, 2006

by Peter Meinke
University of Pittsburgh Press 2006
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

6_5stars_6

Kicking the Air With All Fours

meinke coverI often joke about the reasons I came to New York:  we are the kingmakers, the arbiters of cool. We are #1. Tokyo is closer to us than Kansas City:  new trends arrive here first.  But here’s a poet that myopic New York has overlooked.  Unfamiliar with his work, my initial approach to Peter Meinke’s The Contracted World: New & More Selected Poems was one of humorous trepidation: rhyme? Do I smell eternal verities? And he lives in Florida?  Are we going to be subjected to routine, ironic dissections of tourists and retirees?  But Meinke quickly disarmed my defenses.  I think the section that won me over was The Rat Poems:  New York’s own wild animal!  Now you’re talking.  Here’s one whole poem, titled “At 4am a Rat Crawls Over My Chest”:

I pick up the icepick

Ok, so as it turns out Meinke was born in Brooklyn, but once I realized how long he’s been around (the book selects from 30 years of work), I began to admire his unconcern for trends, and how he’s managed to avoid those labels that make snap judgements (including mine) too easy: formalist, regionalist, objectivist, beat, New York, LA, and parts in between.  I also appreciate that in avoiding those labels, Meinke never indulges in cheap shots at “schools,” “camps,” or “the arbiters of literary taste.”  Meinke has lived in too many different places to limit himself to one locale.  His sense of America is not defensively narrative, anti-intellectual or anti-urban, but neither is it particularly hip. 

How does he manage to find a “middle way” that embraces so much tradition without descending into pretension, crabbiness, or the lament of “the minor poet?”  Throughout The Contracted World, most punctuation is cleverly omitted; spacing, phrasing and line breaks do more than their share of syntactic connection.  This guards against the predictability and manipulation of any poem, whether formally rhymed or free verse.  The reader can pace her reading as she pleases.  She can look backwards and forwards, making connections between words in her own way.  The rhythm remains as anchor, and the rhyme (when there) provides its own punctuation, thanks very much!   It gives the words more room, letting both sentimentality and our “accidental breath” evaporate without giving in to despair.  It also de-emphasizes the difference between his free-form and his more formal poems, making a strong case for the continued vitality of both.

The literary references, lightly applied and appropriately placed, are rarely more than shin deep, but this often works to the advantage of the poem.  A good example is “The Bookshelf”; flat on his back doing therapeutic exercises, the speaker sees his books looming over him and laments lost opportunities: 

Now   I’ve been down so long

I’m too stiff to get up or even reach for a book
so I call for help   not expecting an answer
But from the stern and shadowed shelves
Emma and Anna and all the lost inaccessible
women above me cry out with their special accents
words I understand only from their rhythm and inflection
O sorrow   they say  all of them   over and over

and I like any man who has blindly loved
understand too late   as unhappy endings pour down
just sentences on their weeping and guilty prisoner
pinned to the floor by threads
of vanishing light

I’m not going to tell you this language isn’t traditional, even sentimental, but we are never unaware that the speaker is flat on his back, flailing like an upended turtle.  Meinke knows that finding meaning in poems is sentimental, but it doesn’t make the effort worthless.  If his poems largely omit the planetary and microscopic ends of the scale (no Whitman or Dickinson here, and yes, I do miss them), they never omit the music of language and a real search for meaning; and while by turns playful,  satirical and paradoxical, they never undercut their honesty by descending into nonsense.    Meinke wryly insists in “Recipe:”

You live in at least two worlds
yes?
one fuzzy one where you always push
the doors that say pull and
one clear cold one where you live alone

This is the one where where your poem is
yes?
no
It’s in the other one

In a way that reminds me of Frank O’Hara’s dictum “you just go by nerve,” Meinke tells us at the end of this poem to tear up your anthologies, “use them as mulch for your begonias and/ begin with your hands.”   His love of form is never a cover for pretension or academic theory, and he makes a good argument for the serious coexistence of formalism and free verse within the same poem. 

“A Necessary Bucket” is about Bruce Klunder, a minister crushed by a bulldozer while protesting the construction of a school that would perpetuate school segregation. In the poem, Meinke skillfully mixes rhymed and unrhymed lines without bogging them down in farce.  The speaker recites the rueful excuses for delay and moderation heard both in the north and the south, but after the farcical extremity of placing “ground-hugging plover”  quite near “got yourself run unromantically over,”  the tone skillfully modulates into a series of rhetorical questions that explore Klunder’s motivation, culminating with the line “Ah Klunder  Klunder/ in this inhuman age  how could you make/  such a sad and human blunder?”  This takes a certain kind of bravery, since the poem starts as parodic satire, but will ultimately bring us to a serious statement about the necessity of sacrifice, avoiding both name-calling and the romanticizing of martyrdom.

Witty? Wise?  This reviewer can’t go there.  After being driven into the ground, those words are in the repair shop, and this mechanic is having a tough time ordering the parts to fix them.  But Meinke’s humor is smart.  He knows when he has caught a minnow, and when he has caught a shark.  Is he making me rhyme, too?  Not quite.  But be careful, it could be contagious―and perhaps we should hope it is. Peter Meinke gives the lie to “the nuclear option” in critical debate, and brings a welcome civility to the poetry wars.  But even this sounds too pat.  Unlike the speaker in “The Bookshelf,” Peter Meinke won’t let his work be pinned down.

*

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Dog Star Delicatessen: New and Selected Poems 1979-2006

Tuesday, August 29th, 2006

by Mekeel McBride
Carnegie Mellon University Press 2006
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

7

Holy, Terrible Flowers

mcbride cover

David Young blurbs that Mekeel McBride is a poet of variety “in a climate where poets sometimes get praised for doing one particular thing over and over.” Indeed, the world that McBride develops in Dog Star Delicatessen: New and Selected Poems 1979-2006 shifts from familiar to otherworldly to just plain fantastic. The book proves that over the course of her career, McBride’s imagination has been limitless, as has her ability to represent a spectrum of emotions in poetry.  Inspiration is abundant in this collection and McBride refuses to ignore the upbeat—an attribute that seems particularly courageous in the present global climate. 

Some may call McBride a flowery poet, and it’s hard to argue when the first poem of Dog Star Delicatessen is entitled “Flower.” But, I suppose, even a flower has its rugged side, and this particular blossom “says Fuck you and really means it. / This flower is pollinated by the dead.”  By the poem’s culmination, this coarseness is presented not as cynicism, but as determination: “This flower is a holy terror.”

To imply that McBride’s poetry is devoid of the sardonic or disconsolate would be incorrect.  She has a natural balance of hope and despair, and in some cases, suggests a person creates his or her own happiness or unhappiness.  “Bella,” for example, offers three characters in very different psychological states.  The speaker’s neighbor finds rot in one of his walls when building an addition; he’s freakishly happy as he tells the speaker that he wound up tearing down the whole house, and presently lives in his garage. Though he’s hopeful, the speaker puts herself in his place and thinks, “…I’ve died, in my own mind at least, / from cold-induced dementia.”  She is overwhelmed by the idea of starting over, of losing all that she has already established. Her neighbor’s dog Bella offers a third perspective; she frolics in the broken ground where a new foundation will be laid.

At other times McBride isn’t so explicit.  On occasion, she uses long, slow couplets to create a deep loneliness. “The Well,” for instance, has a tragic setting, yet the source of tension lies elsewhere, imperceptible.  We never discover if a trapped child escapes the well or dies there, but coming to such a resolution is not the poem’s intention.  The solitude suggests anyone could have been—has been—forgotten in that well.  Despite the poem’s graveness there is always the element of hope and desire:

Sometime much later, a mouse brings her a petal.
It could have brought a golden kernel of corn,
a grain of rice.  That part doesn’t matter.

“Available Light” is perhaps the most inspiring poem in the book; without being syrupy, it manages to suggest hope, faith, adaptation, and survival against the worst of odds.  The speaker keeps geraniums indoors through the winter despite the belief of nursery workers that the flowers won’t survive.  The plant, like the speaker, reshapes itself to the available light in order to survive, and to go beyond survival, to thrive. 

Even when McBride deals directly with overwhelmingly somber topics like death, she succeeds in bringing vibrancy and life to the poem, as in “Orchard.”  A friend has died and the speaker remembers the last time she saw him:

nova bursts of tie-dye—the exuberant
and wholly unexpected color of his undershirt

like one of those gorgeous photographs the Hubble
sends back of a new universe taking shape in a place
so far away its almost impossible to imagine.

In a single death the speaker imagines, even creates, an entire new universe; loss is impossible to fully understand, but beauty can still be found in what we don’t completely comprehend.  The poem, then, hints at the infinite.

The idea that everything makes a whole is an important aspect of McBride’s work.  For each poem that describes or identifies with loss there is another, equally moving, that details how to put the pieces back together, or how to continue with one less piece and still be whole. In “Like a Gospel Singer Swan-Winged in Hallelujahs,” the speaker realizes that she hasn’t been appreciating life; late for work, stuck in traffic and construction, she hasn’t even taken “the time / to look for turtles sunning in the sand.” 

Undoubtedly, Mekeel McBride has always been exceptional at writing about animals.  Dog Star offers plenty of these, and probably the best example is selected from her last book, The Deepest Part of the River.  “The Goldfish” is staged around the life and death of a feeder-fish and the relationship the speaker has with it.  She takes care of the fish until it slowly, irreversibly sickens. The speaker is helpless and left to watch the “golden thing” suffer.  It is this natural coupling of beauty and terror that characterizes McBride’s work, that the suffering of an ornamental fish must resonate outward to

…a child chained somewhere

in a basement, starving; the droop-eyed man,
cooking up, in a cast-iron kettle, germ stew
that will end the world.

*

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God’s Silence

Tuesday, August 29th, 2006

by Franz Wright
Knopf 2006
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

8_5

Sacramental, Epiphanic, Zeusian…Moridbund?

God's SilenceGod’s Silence weighs in at a generous 144 pages, suggesting that winning the 2004 Pulitzer for Walking to Martha’s Vineyard has not caused Franz Wright to slack off.  This collection is in fact better than Walking to Martha’s Vineyard.  In these new poems Wright allows himself space to relax, to be more openly humorous, and to ring changes on his obsession with failure and forgiveness.  The extra space does not seem self-indulgent.  The repeated themes and refrains are skilful and welcome variations rather than rote exercises, and encourage rereading of those poems thought weaker at first.  Keeping up the formal interest is the fact that the poems collected here range from one-liners to those several pages in length.   Wright’s work is unashamedly sacramental but rarely pious; his acerbic, self-deprecating wit and love of paradox take care of that:

I just noticed that it is my own private

National Hate Myself and Want to Die Day
(which means the next day I will love my life
and want to live forever).

Wright keeps his sacramental refrains from becoming rote.  We sense that each poem is trying to find its own ending rather than conforming to one.  Still, we are not allowed to rest in the sense of a sleepwalking speaker being led by the nose.  Subject matter and tone are subject to often dizzying shifts that are usually kept from being simply surreal by Wright’s drive towards healing and redemption.

There are poems that offer an almost Shakespearean, formed-from-the-head-of Zeus lyric, and there are others like “Publication Date” that appear to stumble into their own epiphanies.  Though these modes often overlap, they seem essential to a sacramental poet who constantly “call(s) to mind Your constant unrequited/ and preemptive forgiveness.” This line, reclaiming as it does the loaded word “preemptive,” seems more effectively political to me than most poems that declare themselves openly.  Wright wants to speak for everybody, and usually makes his case without catechizing or ideological demonizing.  A possible exception to this is “Woods Hole Ferry,” which eloquently calls out (in his completed lyric mode)

the affluent, the users-up, unconsciously remote
from knowing themselves
our owners and starvers, occupying
as they always have the mansions and beauty of the earth

but even here he knows that the constant presence of death is all the demon anybody needs “before/ we all meet and enter at the same door.”

“I refer to mother Morphine’s left tit,” he writes in “Arkansas Good Friday,” which pictures his father (the late Pulitzer-winner James Wright) emaciated by terminal cancer and chemotherapy, turning back into a hairless baby by sucking the only drug that can keep him from unbearable pain.  Twisted as that image is, as real as the pain is, the redemptive paradox of death is not far behind:

How real it all seemed
for a few years, but I was always
immortal and will be
once more, when I return
to the infinite time
which elapsed before I was conceived:

Just as his emphasis on the spiritual begins to wear thin, Wright often abruptly turns to the material, as he does in “The Visiting.”  After describing the hour of insomnia in which “the ones who can’t rest/ go to bed, and the ones/ who can’t wake go to work,” a dash brings “Dark blue morning glory”:  “I reach to touch, there is another world/ and it is this world.”   Another poem hearkening back to the mode where epiphanies are unbidden and unearned is “Poet’s Room in a Museum”:

Three lbs. of sentient meat
afloat
inside a big pickle jar

saying, Where did I come from
Where are my dead friends

which hints at mordant depths—though interestingly, the same brain image appears less abruptly and more positively (in the traditional Zeusian lyric mode) in “The Hawk:” 

I am changing: this three pound lump
of sentient meat electrified
by hope and terror has learned to hear
His silence like the sun

Throughout God’s Silence Wright shows us how the same hopeless, material facts can be transformed by accepting the ambiguity of language (this example from “Home Remedy:” “You have to set the clock—/ for a moment that doesn’t exist yet/ or one that has already passed, interestingly/ symbolized by the same numeral.”

Wait. I take that back about not demonizing.  After they rejected poems which may well have been taken from the manuscript of this book, Wright fired off a string of hilarious emails to the editors of Poetry, which they published in their May 2005 issue.  Apparently, he does retain a chip on his shoulder for “vengeful, petty, reactionary & aesthetically moridbund [sic] freaks” and purveyors of “Neo-Formalist gibberish.”  It is a streak his father had as well, though the hyperbole of the exchange shows the target presented by the freshly-endowed magazine was perhaps too ready-made.  Wright cites a new “clarity” in poetry, but I don’t think of these poems as exhibiting clarity as much as openness to simplicity and paradox, an unashamed acceptance of emotional vulnerability.

These poems embrace the idea that “who’s had to love the madness/ of his loneliness is blessed.”  Wright’s knowledge of madness, and the insistent urge to embrace both the hopelessness of the condemned (“resubmerge this broken/body in the waters of electrocution,”) and the transformation of redemption (“Fill me with love for the truly afflicted/ that hopeless love, if need be/ make me one of them again” keeps his search for spirituality from being sanctimonious, and buttress his sense that even in the face of death, heaven is there for the choosing.  Franz Wright’s ability to give this paradoxically consoling twist to disparate, hopeless, and often ugly images is so reliable that the wonder is how he continues to surprise each time he does it.

*

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[one love affair]*

Monday, August 7th, 2006

by Jenny Boully
Tarpaulin Sky Press 2006
Reviewed by John Deming

8

What There Is 1

boully coverIf you’re wondering about the brackets and asterisk in the book’s title, I can at least tell you this: if you’re a guy reading on the subway, [one love affair]* makes you feel a little tougher than One Love Affair would. The front cover, which includes a picture of a burnt out crack pipe, works to the same end.

Of course both titles might suggest a story of jilted love and love affairs, of someone weaving through relationships and appreciating the best of each partner before an unraveling—in a sense, the every-person story we’ve heard time and again. In [one love affair]*, a genre-bending back-pocket book that the publisher calls an “extended prose poem,” Boully’s discovered a way to make this story work again. Instead of bogging us down with whining and details, Boully offers inventive, associative nuggets that fuse a reader with the complex and confusing range of emotions everyone gets stuck with in the village of love and plunder. [one love affair]* is gritty and intellectual, it’s addictive and soothing, and it’s fitting for just about anyone’s bookshelf. If her mesh of simple language and brainiac posturing don’t hit you, her sentiments probably will.

There are a million stories of love gone wrong, and they all have the same bottom line. Boully accounts for this by giving little weight to the specifics of her narrator’s story—“I keep leaving out what happened, what really happened towards the end”—so however traditional the emotions are, we’re reminded here that someone new deals with them every day. By the end, you’re grateful for the details she does offer, and you’re reading the book for second, third, and fourth time. The asterisk in the title points to a small paragraph (included on the title page) that offers some of these details. It becomes the reader’s job to place them while reading the text:

A million wallowing anemones, a thousand eyes peeping through, a thousand spies shivering, unnameable endless flowerings, countless empty bottles, twelve flowers, eleven trees, eight fruits, four vegetables, four peppers, two enemas, two kidnappings, one accident, one suicide, one soothsayer, one drowning, one nightclub called Juicy.

[one love affair]* also has very much to do with the act of reading and the ability language has to apprehend, if for an instant, an airy sense of otherness. Boully’s first book, The Body: An Essay (scoop it up if you see it, it’s a tough find these days), was constructed entirely of footnotes, to no related text. In [one love affair]*, the footnote is again her weapon of choice. Her first footnote explains her intentions: “[one love affair]* is meant to illustrate how, when reading, our minds often supply another narrative. This book is thus the narrative that snuck in when reading various books, which are documented in subsequent footnotes.” The result is a psychic map that helps the reader live such a story on an emotional level—something like virtual reality, fragment by fragment. Boully knows that anyone reading her book is likely creating their own “narrative,” so again, she’s made her narrator’s story the every-person story. Plot is second to sensation, and the reader fills in the blanks with both Boully’s hints and their own associative wanderings of the mind (though methinks there’s plot enough here to satisfy the fiction crowd).

She wends a story of broken relationships, deploying everything from mimosa trees and spring to nightclubs and crack-smoke. The creep of nostalgia is there from the beginning; in the book’s opening, we appear to have caught the narrator mid-thought:

She remembers the story he told her, about taking a walk with his
former lover during one of the very first days of spring, a spring
which soured then ripened then soured then ripened before beginning
again, a spring which kept swelling out of winter in a way that Chaucer’s
spring would never do.

In a footnote to this sentence, the reader learns Boully has mimicked the syntax of a sentence by Robert Belaño: “…watching clouds crumble, break apart and scatter in the Chilean sky, as Baudelaire’s clouds would never do.” So, her thoughts are a subtext to Belaño’s, and your thoughts as you read are a subtext to Boully’s. Sort of. As the book progresses, the narrator is defined as much by her dreams as she is by her waking life. Whatever brainstorming she did about footnotes when constructing the final version of The Body pays off big time in [one love affair]* ; a richness and density is added to her soft language. The wandering, cathartic romanticism is sometimes Virginia Woolf and sometimes Anne Carson’s Glass Essay, but in the end it’s all Boully.

Another distinguishing trick is repetition. Sentences, like the narrator’s lovers, come and go, they change forms, they leave you sometimes surprised and sometimes disappointed to see they’ve returned or that you returned to them. In the book’s third section, titled “There is Scarcely More than There Is,” the narrator becomes involved with a female lover. Over the course of the book, Boully frequently splices random (symbolic?) imagery with her narrative:

In the bowl filled with water, the green beans floated on the surface,
as if they had never been loved by the bottom of anything. I did not
think she would last long.  She said she needed cats because cats would
love her back, and they would love her unconditionally. I did not think
she would last long; she was already twenty-two and wrinkling and taken
to hard labor in rural Blue Ridge weather.

In the subsequent paragraph, the narrator uses a well-honed sense for repetition and recycles the notion that that this new lover wouldn’t last: “She said she had given me everything, excepting fidelity; she asked why couldn’t I love without there being acts of love? She would not last long, I knew.”

The narrator in [one love affair]* constantly struggles between inadequate lovers (one guy takes her to a party “where everyone was covered with bruises, so decrepit were they on crack”) and a lack of ability or desire to stick with any one person. She concludes that when relationships unravel, it’s really beyond reason, and what’s left is how amazing the relationship was at the start. Here, the “main character” is referred to from the third- rather than first-person perspective: “In a last correspondence, she posed a question which he never answered. In last correspondences, never so much about what it was that really did happen in the end, in the very end. There is instead so much talk about beginnings.”

The third section’s title, “There Is Scarcely More Than There Is,” is borrowed from Gertrude Stein, and does well to explain Boully’s obsession with footnotes. Some might say that to put words on paper is to mark “something.” To footnote any of those words, then, is to imply “other”—the “more than there is.” If Boully’s first book is regarded as an army of footnotes to the ineffable, it should be noted that it was originally published in Seneca Review as a lyric essay. They were transformed later, and perhaps she was still fleshing out the idea. In [one love affair]* the narrative, often borrowed and transformed into a map of the psyche, dictates its own footnotes. Her work is better for the shift, and better in general; that’s to say, Boully has delivered after a promising debut and carved out her niche in American poetry.

Her new book, like her first, embodies the split between what’s here and what’s there, borrowing its sentences from everywhere and situating the work in a modernist nothing that bleeds an attempt to balance it all, both intellectually and emotionally. Beginnings and endings in the midst of an impossible otherness are vital (the prolific Boully’s third book, Book of Beginnings and Endings, is due out next year from Sarabande). Despite its density, [one love affair]* speaks to human nature on its most basic level. The implication of “other”—which supersedes any partner as an object to be feared and obsessed over—results in an obsessive need for urgency, an attempt to access the “more” from yourself and from others while knowing you’ll wind up right back where you started.

___________

1More Than There Is

*

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Things We Don’t Know We Don’t Know

Monday, August 7th, 2006

by Matt Mason
The Backwaters Press 2006
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

1_5

Beasties are Better

mason cover

I have to disagree with Ron Block in his foreword to Matt Mason’s Things We Don’t Know We Don’t Know, when he says of Mason, “He’s funny.”  It’s solemnity, not humor, that wets Mason’s whistle, and perhaps his solemn musings are mistaken for an attempt at dark humor.

In “Coffee and Astronomy” the speaker is lamenting; he doesn’t have a girl, he’s a “screwup,” and maybe if he weren’t such a screwup the girl would like him, and they could “shower together to save water.”  Ignoring the “unrequited love from a girl across the room” cliché, if the poem continued in this manner then yes, I might say it was funny, funny because the speaker’s situation is pitiable. However, the poem takes on a more serious tone by its closing.  He admits he’s scared of the girl and says:

…her eyes
as small as stars,
        the light having taken years to reach me here
at this gargantuan table as big as my life.

The idea of enormity here is frightening and we’re able to understand the speaker’s fears as opposed to just laughing at them.

Unfortunately, Mason’s seriousness doesn’t always produce the desired effect.  At times his lines resemble the emo lyrics of awful bands like Dashboard Confessional rather than the lyricism of a bona fide “poem.” The poem “I May Not Know Where I’m Going, But I’m Making Damn Good Time” contains the lines, “and it’s raining/ and she loves me again.” Another poem, but with a much more interesting title—“The Swedish Turnip”—succumbs to the same sappiness, “…I probably still love her./ I read some Vonnegut for answers.” Ick.

When Mason successfully avoids somber sap he forms strangely clever lines like, “We would lasso and break wild/ facultative anaerobes and ride those proud beasties.” Mason, a Nebraskan, also can have an acute and striking ability to make nature seem unnatural. In “The Thin Line of What I Know” he writes, “I watch the trees along the road perform / all their acts: fat, naked, flowering, flaming, green, chainsawed.”  By giving the trees the ability to “perform” these acts rather than succumb to them, Mason creates a world in which trees could be our equals—odd at least. 

Mason took the title of his book from an anti-terror speech given by Donald Rumsfeld in 2003. Mason is clearly horrified by the Bush administration, and quotes Rumsfeld in an epigraph for the poem “Code Orange”:

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.

Yes, Rumsfeld is a snake. Still, Mason’s political poems tend to miss the mark, as in “How I Love You (the John Ashcroft Remix)—“I have done this /…for Al Gore and sex among consenting married heterosexual adult / women and men.” And other tricks—i.e. stealing a line from Stephen Crane’s “In the Desert”—offer little more than a dull thud.

With the knowledge that Matt Mason is foremost a “slam” poet—both he and his wife, Sarah McKinstry-Brown, holding workshops and performances at schools throughout the Midwest—it is clear that the poems in this collection are missing and in need of the stage, for better or worse.

*

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Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems

Monday, August 7th, 2006

by David Wojahn
U. of Pittsburgh Press 2006
Reviewed by John Deming

6_5stars_6

Easy Baby Easy

Interrogation PalaceIn the 24 years since his first book was published, David Wojahn has remained a peripheral poet, a writer of strong narrative and elegy that’s consistently recognized as pretty good rather than pretty great. As you’d expect from a “selected” published two and a half decades into a poet’s career, Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems collects some of the best work from his first six books alongside some equally good (if not better) new work. The book’s biggest success is its design; either the writer or his editors were able to distinguish a thread in Wojahn’s work, and the book builds a surprising arc between his present and past, finally holding up as a unit rather than a choppy sampling of earlier work. The book might not beat a confession out of you, but a lot of it is very…good.

The first section, titled “For the Poltergeists: New Poems,” is centered on a topic that Wojahn is hard pressed to ignore: the political climate. Flooded with anger at the Bush regime, Wojahn co-opts the voice of W himself: “Even my generals gasping—such dazzling display, / What thundering shock & awe had I made.” But more interesting than political-animal Wojahn is bleeding-heart Wojahn. “Scrabble with Matthews,” a new poem, crowns the elegiac side that’s dominated his career. In the poem, the poet imagines being snowed in at an airport with a fellow sad-hearted storytelling poet, the late-great William Matthews, who died unexpectedly from a heart attack in 1997 at the age of 55. The speaker had been Matthews’s “opening act” the night before, when Matthews read his “then-new poems” and spoke to the crowd:

“Why do you write
something nobody reads anymore?” queried one
little trust fund in a blazer. “Because
I’m willing to be honestly confused
& honestly fearful.”

Wojhan knows how to write a tribute because he allows the Matthews quote—verbatim, according to Wojahn—to stand as the strongest moment in the poem. Other elegies, including those for his father and for hard-luck story guru Raymond Carver, are equally gracious and strong.

Despite Wojahn’s propensity toward elegy, the real arc of the book deals with the narrator’s own story. The first line of the first poem suggests a father beaming with pride for his infant son: “Two new words a day & sometimes three—cup & doll, yesterday throat / & hot, hot hot.”  At first glance, he’s a guy annoyingly proud of his kid; in the end, you’re proud as hell for him. This first new poem reveals his fatherhood, which becomes important as we jump back in time to the older selections.  Ordered chronologically thereafter, we don’t return to the present until the book’s final section.  By that point it’s been learned through our modestly abashed narrator that he’s been unable, over the years, to impregnate his wife, referred to throughout as “N.” The book’s final poem, “Kill Born, Weed Smoke, Chk Mark, Onchola Senn,” is from his last book, 2002’s Spirit Cabinet and admits continued frustration at an inability to inseminate: “N.’s again unpregnant, / / & medicates herself downstairs / on murder mysteries.” Late that night, the narrator discovers a young couple that has trespassed on his property. The girl is sobbing, and consoled by a boyfriend repeating “easy baby, easy.”    

If you’re easily bored by narrative poetry, Wojahn won’t keep you around the way, say, Matthews might. He’s had some missteps, including an ill-advised series titled “Mystery Train (A Sequence)” that does a disinteresting job displaying a fusion of pop music and poetry. An attempt at showing “Lou Reed After the Wake of Delmore Schwartz” is particularly unfortunate: “The ‘ludes / I’d done were coming on. The room went numb.” More recent poems are bigger successes, especially the surprisingly welcome experimentation in “Crayola: A Sequence,” superhero-obsessed dual monologue that might not look or smell as sweet as a 64 box of Crayolas, but has its own magic.

Still Wojhan readily admits in a new poem that he’s among those thirsting to find, rather than be, a hero: “The hero chose silence—the likely choice a hero / will make. & unforgivable.” But having a child makes him seem hero enough. Interrogation Palace becomes important because it not only throws some new poems into the walk-the-line Wojahn canon, but adds a new chapter to the man’s story. At last, by way of what is apparently artificial insemination, he’s been able to conceive. It’s the best of Wojahn, and while it might not leave you running to email the anthologists, you might find you’d like to pat him on the back and buy him a beer.

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