POETS' CORNER
Over the last few years, I've been fortunate to serve as columnist for Poets' Corner, a monthly space generously provided by the Book Review and its editors. Their commitment to poetry has made it possible for me to comment on contemporary verse and acquire a sense of its varied readership. I am taking a yearlong leave of absence at this time, but Poets' Corner will continue. I'd like to thank Book Review and this column's readers for their thoughtful attention, feedback and support.
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Red Shoes
Honor Moore
W.W. Norton: 90 pp., $23.95
These poems are so charged with sexual heat and erotic suppleness that even the revered avuncular symbolist Wallace Stevens comes off (in an eponymous poem) as a burnished biker:
was snug over robust chest
and belly, his golden hair
long, his beard
full as a biker's. How many great
poets ride a motorcycle?
OK -- T.S. Eliot on a Harley? Tu Fu on a dirt bike? These poems spin themselves out of a centrifuge of hypnotic reverie and desire. They are as intense in unfurling the colors of seduction as they are in shading the darker, more inflected, hues of elegy. Grief and desire flow together here, becoming a single mesmerizing red-blue flame.
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Wedding Day
Dana Levin
Copper Canyon Press: 72 pp., $14
Dana levin's poems are extravagant, yet they are self-contained and circumspect. Her mind keeps making unexpected connections, and the poems push beyond convention in structure and imagery. They surprise us:
The story of guns in someone
else's city, every day with your
toast and coffee --
Then the red and blue over the
green of the park, oranged in
the trash can fires.
Could anything be purely
aesthetic
when appearance was the
symptom of a disease --
You drove past them under a
regiment of stars.
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Ghost Pain
Sydney Lea
Sarabande Books: 102 pp., $13.95
"Ghost pain" is an expansive and protean narrative. The title's reference to the phantom discomfort felt after limbs have been lost can also mean the suffering of the dead, of lost ones. People gather in these poems ("one more safe tiny place amid the great unsafe"); thus the living and dead seem connected by their longing for a haven ("and the only miracle for this lonely minute: / we were inside") and for someone to tell the story of personal salvation. These talky, bluesy poems go on in one's head long after they've been read.
