WInter Reading

Jean Day: Enthusiasm Odes (Adventures in Poetry, 2006)

Day uses rhyme in a way akin to compulsion, making the reader feel like it is always present, even in conversational language. This book doesn’t attempt music in the typical sense, because sound can be as disconcerting as it is pleasurable. The first half of the book is dense. Make sure you make it to the second section: Otium. This section is pure pleasure with the same ranging scope or observation as the first section (after a stop/at Woolworth’s for/supplies we reconnoiter/at the horizon, itself fortified/with flags and last/hats, a poignant/remainder of its own tendency/to disappear”) but with the judgment dialed back to allow more wonder through (a substitution that is usually incorrect/and the call to evening roulette/whose interest attaches us to what is not/ourselves but our everyday lapses).

Lisa Robertson: The Men: A Lyric Book (Book Thug, 2006)

Lyric indeed! This book is an enticing mix of sharp repetition, elongated syntax and refracted voice: “Such is the potent harmony.” She also writes: “I am preoccupied with grace/And have started to speak expensively.” And whether the language is hers or theirs or ours, this book uses its language to order us, gracefully, to pay attention to [the cost of] the words we use and how words are used to name, to define and to lay claim: “The value of the/money is changed according to the men who repeat/virtue and truth, virtue and truth and things written on/coins accordingly.” I love love love this book.

Elizabeth Willis. Meteoric Flowers (Wesleyan, 2006)
Terrific prose poems, Thomas Pynchon of Poetry, or is that Thomasina? Not to be missed is this book, nymphs, nations, subterranean fires, plundered honey. Cornucopia of concupiscence, longing fulfilled. Happiness for poets.

Jocelyn Saidenberg. Negativity. (atelos, 2006)
More prose poems. Darker. If Henry James married Jean Genet. Hmmmm.

Anselm Berrigan. Some Notes on My Programming (Edge Books, 2006)
The cover is perfect, birds and music notes coming out of one of Anselm's ears and a crazy rainbow out of the other. "I like this poem/its a good poem/it married higher than itself."
Sunshine!

Michael Early Craig. Yes, Master (Fence Books, 2006)
We are touring an old hotel in velvet and wood. Details, details, details, a dense book, crookedly earudite. A funny man poet, a mile a minute comic. Potpourri postmodernique.

The Garden Room by Joy Katz (Tupelo, 2006)

This book begins with a Gertrude Stein epigraph, and like Tender Buttons, the poems are all titled after objects, but these objects are quite clearly all in one room. The poems are a complete departure from Stein in their syntax, and the way they infuse objects with emotions is completely un-coded. That isn’t to say that we aren’t to suspect that something of the poet’s context doesn’t find its way in, as Stein’s did, but the realm of these poems is often collective, and though the objects of the poem make up one room, Katz infuses them with the world outside of the room: “The purified fleets of nations have pulled in./Christianized themes read out behind high, aroused doors.” Objects in these poems are fascinatingly active in the process of observation: daffodils might “startle like gunshot,/a punch in the face; the white of bedsheets might “flood the space between my eyes.” This book doesn’t have to be read as a companion to Tender Buttons; the poems are immediately pleasurable on their own. But if such a reading interests you, read “Birds”(p.18) and decide for yourself how Katz reads Stein.

Richard Meier. Shelley Gave Jane a Guitar (Wave Books, 2006)
"A ball of rain sliced into mist" Poems full of allusions and illusions, 'defying non-existence." Trompe l'oeil poetry at its most intense.

Alex Lemon. Mosquito (Tinhouse Books, 2006).
Intense, it gets inside, is from the inside, disasters and disasters overturned, blue, red, black poems. Wired. Yes, yes, its about being a patient, and being patient and not patient, by moreso about being a poet.

Ben Lerner. Angle of Yaw (Copper Canyon, 2006)
Philosophe poetry about laster technology, video games, cameras and other technologies of communication, wild and varied. Out from under the shadow of Benjamin and fascinatingly so.

Alice Notley. Grave of Light, new and selected poems, 1970-2005. (Wesleyan, 2006)
A copious sampler of the work of one of our major poets. As Anne Waldman says on the dj:
"This wondrous tome is a calling to a higher resolve, where the poet is a trusty "seer"/"antennae of the race" and communes with the powers of the universe." Right on Anne.

0 TO 9, The complete magazine: 1967-1969. Edited by Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2006).
What a service from UDP, reprinting all the issues and supplementi of this most amazing of mimeo magazines. Conceptual art and poetry at its best. A work of art.