Sarah Pemberton Strong
Alyson Publications ($13.95)

by Rebecca Weaver

Sarah Pemberton Strong's debut novel Burning the Sea explores the idea that all politics originate in the physical and personal body; despite our protests to the contrary, we cannot separate the events of our lives and bodies from the larger social, linguistic, or geopolitical contexts through which they move. Strong blurs the line between what constitutes a political body—be it land, language, or voting bloc—and what constitutes the political body, as the two main characters move in (and sometimes against) their bodies and the stories that make up the body of the island of Santo Domingo.

Michelle and Tollomi meet in the Santo Domingo airport after Michelle's bags are confiscated and Tollomi tries to help her. She has just arrived from Germany, after witnessing both the collapse of her own love affair and the Berlin Wall. Her reason for travelling to Santo Domingo is to find the house and land her grandparents bought (and soon deserted) before her mother was born. Tollomi has arrived from Guatemala, where he was monitoring media censorship, and comes to Santo Domingo to research a revolutionary group there called the "Quisqueyas."

Aside from these ostensible reasons, neither Michelle nor Tollomi can articulate to each other why it is they persistently leave each place they visit. Michelle has no memories of her childhood (except those told to her) and her mind often drifts away. As these lapses intensify ("as I watched from a distance, the woman who was me dropped the tea cup she held . . ."), she leaves lovers, jobs, countries. Tollomi was born to a shipping magnate's wife and a Cruzan sailor. Torn away from his home in neighboring St. Croix by his father and thrust into boarding school as a young boy, he can't quite recapture his young identity and the language that gave it to him. Michelle and Tollomi begin their journey together by splitting a hotel room, and soon they are travelling around the island together, working on the house, and visiting revolutionaries. They are not bound by familial or romantic ties—their strong bond develops out of the instinctive knowledge that each of them live in bodies they don't completely own.

Narratives of destruction, colonialism, and revolution are layered in and through Michelle and Tollomi's own stories, but what's most compelling about Burning the Sea is that the narration is split between the alternating voices of Michelle and Tollomi, which underscores the fluidity of identity and culture and memory they experience. Strong's beautifully written intersection between the body politic and the political body does what all good literature does; it resonates simultaneously on a number of levels, be they political, linguistic, historical, personal, etc., without having to grandstand.

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Harold Jaffe
FC2 ($12.95)

by Mark Tursi

In False Positive, "doing violence to a text" takes on new meaning. Each "story" in the collection is a newspaper article that Jaffe has "treated," which is to say, blasted, uncovered, ruptured, expanded, exposed, scrutinized, and/or fictionalized to reveal an often insidious subtext, or, in Jaffe's own words, a "terrorist" one. In the author's note preceding the stories, he writes, "I enter the article, and by various stratagems expose the host text's predictable but obscured ideology, in the process teasing out its most fertile . . . subtexts."

From the Columbine High School massacre to a man accused of sexually abusing livestock, Jaffe unabashedly forays into the world of journalism to reveal a variety of often hidden or nuanced ideological agendas, or blatant cultural assumptions and political objectives that are so often overlooked by most readers. Jaffe dives into these "true" stories, and emerges with an unsettling almost Baudrillard-like vision of America; i.e. a horrific veil of simulacra replete with image upon image of startling, darkly comic, and nightmarish human behaviors.

In all of the stories, Jaffe attempts to locate the kernel of the narrative and reveal the grotesque, comic and absurd character of American culture. In stories like "Carthage, Miss."—in which a young, nine-year-old boy fails to report the death of his mother and presumably lives with the corpse in a trailer for days—Jaffe comes close to revealing what's beneath the veil of media discourse, i.e. real families and real people. In the final piece, "Dr. Death," a faux/virtual Internet interview with Dr. Kevorkian, the doctor responds to the talk show interviewer by saying, "Think for a minute. Because you're an Internet host in a shiny suit with surgically repaired features and a hair weave shouldn't prevent you from thinking." Later in the same story, in a somewhat didactic but poignant moment, he writes, "You say 'scientists' as if it's a privileged category. Scientists, like lawyers and corporate managers, and Internet hosts, tend to be cowards. Afraid to deviate from the culture that rewards their cowardice. When challenged, they justify their cowardice with lies and character assassination."

In the story "Mad Cow," the author weaves and juxtaposes numerous vignettes that range from agricultural terrorism to sex with livestock to what seems like a pre-9/11 glimpse at bin Laden. What emerges is a comic/tragic view of human kind's relationship to animals and to each other. Jaffe's deadpan humor and candor, in lines like, "Several ranchers reported that their horses behaved 'strangely' after what they described as Milhous's trespassing late-night visits," demonstrates his ability to joke as well as disturb, and his sardonic wit often buoys the text. However, his "treatments" too often do not explore deeply enough; they rarely uncover the disturbing "reality" or human quality that lies behind the news stories.

Still, the conceptual framework for this collection of altered found-texts is an intriguing glimpse at the ways in which journalistic language is never completely objective, and in fact, how all texts are political configurations in one way or another. Jaffe is acutely self-conscious about the way in which these new "prosthetic texts," as he calls them, are "rearmed," to work a different kind of audience manipulation—one that he hopes will prove to be more insightful and enlightening than the original. Though he doesn't always pull it off, the more effective of these pieces engage the reader with a dark sort of laughter.

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James Sallis
Walker Books ($23.95)

by Kris Lawson

There's a painting hanging in the Tate Gallery in London: "Ghost of a Flea" by William Blake (1757-1827). It's dark and frightening, one of Blake's visions. Blake believed that fleas are inhabited by the souls of bloodthirsty men, and here he depicts one such spirit: a muscular figure stares avidly into an empty cup, its tongue flickering greedily, its eyes bulging. For Blake, a spirit this thirsty for blood had to be confined to a flea's size and limits—if it were within a man, for example, that man would be driven to consume the world. Blake's painting conveys this horrid sense of energy; the figure with its arms and legs poised for action, looks ready to rip out of its crackled paint skin in search of more blood.

Lew Griffin is searching for that thirsty ghost, among others. In Ghost of a Flea, Griffin becomes involved with a series of mysteries, the primary one being the search for a stalker who sends elliptically threatening letters signed William Blake. Griffin, a private detective, is also a writer who hasn't written in years, a teacher who doesn't teach, and a book reviewer who never finishes reading his assigned books. For Griffin, the thirst within, the ghost of a flea, represents the urge to create, to make something that lasts, to want life. And somehow, he's lost it.

Days of the week and hours of the day seem to mean little to Griffin, for whom a typical day might include sitting for 12 hours in a bar drinking coffee, then falling asleep on a bench in the front hallway of his house—or meeting a sweaty, shouting man in an alley who delivers imaginary babies from invisible mothers. After a few pages it becomes clear that Griffin's elusive style is his art form: combining observation with investigation, Griffin drifts through this grim world, trusting to his instincts for guidance. As an African-American in New Orleans who has seen the sour side of human nature, he isn't surprised when he sees more and worse evil-saddened, yes, but not shocked. He dulls his own pain with books and alcohol, quoting others to distance himself. Musing about Whitman and drinking, Griffin says that "things, objects are a coherent world to themselves, the 'dumb, beautiful ministers of reality.'"

Certainly they become that when you're drunk. You watch for hours as shadows from a palm or banana tree toss heads, sway and sweep wings across the wall beside your bed, doing all the creative things you should be doing. Towels tossed on the floor by the tub suddenly seem to harbor both great beauty and codes never before suspected, kennings just beyond reach, the towels' folds and convolutions catching up, as a phonograph record does sound, those of your own mind.

James Sallis has written five other Lew Griffin novels, as well as criticism, biography, and collections of poetry. Sallis's prose reflects his character's thoughts: skimming the surface of a bright day, skipping from one face to another, an old, sad memory overtaking his narrator's mind. Griffin, in fact, moves through New Orleans like a poet (which he is, in addition to his other occupations): every sight, sound and action has a meaning and emotion attached to it, seemingly unrelated things are part of a bigger pattern.

Sallis wisely doesn't spend a lot of time dwelling on hardboiled tropes. As an African-American, a southerner, and a detective with an unhappy childhood and a lost love, Lew Griffin has seen it all so many times that the drinking and the investigations are simply parts of his life. He couldn't function without them. For Lew, the imperative mystery becomes, what happened to his life? At the beginning of the book, he is in a room with a body, and he's looking out the window, thinking about the path that led him and the body to that room. Everything outside that window seems like it's in a dream.

Griffin's search for the stalker, and for his missing son David, lead him to old friends, ghosts of ex-lovers, and enemies. No matter which way he turns, he still encounters himself. "World-weary" is generally used to imply a cynical, hardened character; Lew is simply weary of his world. Everything else—his lover leaving, an old friend getting shot—fades in comparison to the detective's true search—a search for himself at the bottom of all these memories and unfinished books, quotations and large chunks of missing time. He sometimes wonders if he should be searching at all:

When I was a kid, parents would tell us not to cross our eyes because they'd get stuck and we'd never be able to uncross them, we'd have to walk around like that the rest of our lives. That's what introspection can come down to. You keep on with it, sinking through level after level, after a while you can't get back to the top. You just go on pounding out the same thoughts on the stone over and over, fitting your feet into old footprints.

Private detectives like Lew Griffin are often called hardboiled for a reason—nothing gets into their shells until they're destroyed. Hardboiled detectives muse on the scenes around them but leave them behind by the next chapter, moving on in obdurate existentialism. For them, there are no loose ends, because they solve every mystery ruthlessly. Ghost of a Flea is more of an eloquent meditation than a mystery—and the meditation is on regret, death, loss, and the ultimately unsolvable mystery.

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Kenzaburo Oe
Translated by John Nathan
Grove Press ($24)

by Jason Picone

For those readers who have yet to discover the Nobel Prize winner Kenzaburo Oe, Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! is the perfect introduction to the Japanese writer's sometimes bizarre but always humanist fiction. First published in 1986, now available in English for the first time, Rouse Up is such a generous work of art that it cannot help but enlarge every reader it reaches.

Rouse Up is the story of K, a famous Japanese novelist who bears more than a passing resemblance to the real life Oe. Like Oe, K has a severely disabled son, Eeyore, whose care requires the painstaking attention of his family. As Eeyore nears the age of 20, K reflects back on a promise he made to himself, that he would define every complexity of life in such a manner that his son could comprehend him, a daunting undertaking given Eeyore's condition:

Since my son had begun to ponder with his own kind of urgency what would happen following my death, was I not obliged as his father to prepare him, unflinchingly and without falling into idleness, for his relationship to the world, society, and mankind after that inevitable moment had arrived?

The problem with this ambitious plan is that K doubts it is possible to write such a comprehensive guide; the slender text of Rouse Up is what he writes instead, and it fulfills his original intention in a manner that is both unexpected and sublime. K begins rereading the poetry of William Blake, an author who has always inspired him and served as an influence for a number of his novels. Rouse Up does not rely on plot (of which there is little) for structure, but is framed instead by numerous passages of Blake's poetry, from which all the chapters draw their title.

Like all great readers, K reads autobiographically, thrusting himself into Blake's poetry and relating it to various phenomena in his life in creative and powerful ways. K's many life lessons to Eeyore correspond to a poem or line of Blake's that K has been drawn to meditate on. This odd, almost mystical, strategy enables K to talk to Eeyore about death and other weighty topics, but K's immersion in Blake also leads him to compare his own writing with that of the master:

The sum total of my work as an author felt shallow and simplistic, not equal to a single page of Blake; moreover, it seemed to me that I had failed to accomplish a single thing I should have been doing and now time was running out. I had declared my intention to define everything in and of this world for my son's sake, but I hadn't. The definitions were for me as well, yet I was neglecting them.

But while K recriminates himself here and expresses a sense of failure, he refuses to submit to hopelessness, and keeps writing. K draws on Blake's words to voice what he himself cannot articulate, using the poet as a bridge between himself and Eeyore. In this way, Blake conquers K's fears and frustrations concerning how to best assist Eeyore, simplifying the inordinate task K has undertaken and finally enabling him to speak to Eeyore. Thus, Blake, who wrote, "The Imagination is not a State: / it is the Human Existence itself," empowers K to employ his imaginative powers to write a guide of existence for his son.

Just as K attempts to explain the complexities of life to Eeyore, so too does he gradually reveal his oddities, slowly enticing the reader with his strange and occasionally grotesque thoughts. K cannot prevent himself from sharing his desire to murder Eeyore when the boy was but five weeks old, a grisly thought that the reader cannot help but ascribe to the real life Oe. K berates himself for his transgressions, idleness, and being a poor husband and father, but, even though he thought of killing Eeyore, his ability to fight against and overcome pessimism, combined with his superhuman faith and patience, make him an admirable and memorable character.

Oe's appropriation of Blake suggests a theme of art in art, which corresponds to K's message of life in life—that is, his efforts to enable Eeyore to make a good life for himself from the lessons of his father's life, not to mention K's strong belief, despite some admitted doubts, that his mentally disabled child can have a meaningful life. The novel is powered by K's ability to make connections between his life and Blake's poetry, the benefits of which are passed on to the son. The considerable resemblance of K to Oe makes the novel all the more remarkable, since it is, according to the translator's afterword, but a few exaggerations, imagined solutions, and too-neat coincidences away from being nonfiction. The strongest addition to Oe's canon in English in years, Rouse Up is a masterpiece from a singular author at the height of his powers.

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Jim Krusoe
Dalkey Archive Press ($14.95)

by Carrie Mercer

Consider the poetry of internal organs: "the bloated, spongy butterflies of lungs, the shy parenthesis of kidneys, the lurid exclamation marks of livers, the cheerful blimps of stomachs, the loopy daydreams of intestines, the schools of tiny pancreas, and dark, brooding spleens." Aren't they really quite endearing? This unexpected tenderness toward body parts is typical of the strange, funny surprises in Iceland, Jim Krusoe's surreal first novel.

The narrative line of Iceland is deceptively simple. After protagonist Paul visits an organ bank to pick out a new organ and instead ends up making love to Emily, the organ tender, he spends the rest of his life trying to sort out and relive the details of that afternoon. As the years pass, he makes elaborate attempts to link events and people in his current life to memories of those few hours spent with Emily.

At times, Paul's experiences seem ridiculously improbable, as when he falls into a volcano—and survives—but then even Paul acknowledges their unbelievable quality: bouncing down the side of the volcano, he describes his body as a "horribly deformed ball [falling] down a funnel-shaped roulette wheel of the sort that only appears in dream sequences of bad motion pictures." At other times, Paul seems oblivious to the virtually impossible level of detail in his observations, as when he describes an ice mural that depicts some greeting cards: "It was clear, even through the imperfect medium of ice-carving, that they were poorly printed, and on cheap paper."

The stories Paul remembers Emily telling him gradually grow longer and more elaborate, full of philosophical musings on the nature of memory and desire. Attached as he is to these memories, Paul recognizes early on how inaccurate his recollections are, "reconstructed out of a combination of memory, hope, and a little water in my left ear at the time, which made it hard for me to understand exactly what she was saying."

Luckily, Paul's longing for the elusive Emily doesn't prevent him from having other interesting relationships along the way. He befriends Leo, a carpet cleaner whose number he dialed by mistake while trying to phone Emily. The comical sensitivity evident in Paul's description of organs shows up again when he considers Leo: "As he wheezed, he rocked slightly from side to side, not like a tall tree exactly, but more like a bush about to topple. And like many a bush, there was something oddly likable about him." When Paul accompanies a despondent Leo to Iceland for a vacation, he looks for ways to cheer up his friend. "'A volcano. Lava. Fire. Ice. Who can be sad?'" a tour rep insists.

Ensuing years find Paul married with children, then alone again, searching for Emily. The astute reader will delight in assembling connections that Paul somehow misses in his obsessive search for Emily, making Iceland a sort of philosophical mystery. Looking hard for clues, one might wonder why Paul keeps encountering pairs of men whose names all start with "D" and "S," and why they wear winter clothing inappropriate to the climate. Then again, one might get infected with the same "philosophy virus" Paul caught from Emily.

On any level, Iceland is an intimate engagement, experimental fiction free of the malevolence that marks much of the genre. Instead of violence, Krusoe relies on an appealing, melancholic humor to surprise the reader, making plausible such unlikely possibilities as experiencing "The Banana Boat Song" as a maudlin dirge.

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Josef Skvorecky
Various translators
Farrar, Straus and Giroux ($25)

by Tricia Cornell

A memoir would seem almost superfluous for a writer like Josef Skvorecky. Approaching 70, with nearly 20 books behind him, the Czech dissident and émigré publisher has been telling the story of his life through his characters for more than four decades. Intriguingly, however, he has collected two dozen of these stories—all of them previously published, though many of them appearing for the first time in English—into When Eve Was Naked: Stories of a Life's Journey. Even with a handful of different narrators, the stories interlock to tell of a remarkable life.

These are the stories of Danny Smiricky (Skvorecky's long-time alter ego and the hero of his novels The Miracle Game and The Engineer of Human Souls) and Josef and Prema from the town of K. or Kostelec or Nachod (Skvorecky's real home town). But together they tell the story of Czechoslovakia, of all of Eastern Europe, and of a generation that grew up in that scary, hopeful, uncertain period between the two world wars.

The stories begin, as they should, in innocence. A little boy refuses to learn how to read because he loves the sound of his mother's voice telling him bedtime stories. And he believes his mother when she tells him that all liars are betrayed by their tell-tale soft noses. But even eight-year-old Danny is not entirely shielded from politics. In the title story, he shares an Italian seaside resort with a cohort of priggish Hitler Youth. At that age, however, he isn't paying attention to them: he's distracted by the pigtails and tiny ankles of a girl named Eve.

As Danny grows up, political concerns deepen. His German teacher is Jewish. His doctor, his neighbors and a sympathetic girl at school are Jewish. While Skvorecky and his main characters are Catholics, it's clear that they, like all of Prague, Eastern Europe, and the rest of the world, struggle with a "Jewish question" of their own. How could they fail to notice the yellow stars, the disappearing neighbors, the packed trains headed north and west, and eventually the individual stragglers back from Terezin? But then again, how could teenagers not be distracted, like Danny and Skvorecky, by jazz music, American zoot-suiters and the flip of a girl's skirt?

Skvorecky escaped Czechoslovakia in 1969, after the Soviet tanks rolled in to put an end to the Prague Spring and to show definitively that "Communism with a human face" was not to be. But the story of escape he chooses to publish here takes place during the first Soviet invasion, in 1948, when Skvorecky would have been 24. In "Spectator on a February Night," young Josef and his Hollywood-worshipping gablik buddies (fans and imitators of Clark Gable) pack stylish suits into valises and drive across the border in a two-seater Packard. Perhaps that's the way Skvorecky wishes he had emigrated, rather than waiting out two decades of oppression.

Eventually Skvorecky makes it to Canada, teaching at a small college in Toronto, and he brings his alter egos along with him. A little boy talks with his mom in "our language" and an émigré professor tries to fathom his students' North American sexual mores.

Skvorecky's pace is so measured, his details so meticulous, that he is almost a tease (not surprisingly, he has also written a handful of murder mysteries). But together those details—remembered or invented—make When Eve Was Naked the most honest kind of memoir: one that is not ashamed to be as much fiction as fact.

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Iztok Osojnik
translated by Sonja Kravanja
Modry Peter Publishers ($11.95)

by Susan Smith Nash

IIztok Osojnik, who lives and writes in Ljubljana, Slovenia, has published more than 16 collections of poetry, many of which have been translated from Slovenian into English. Perhaps the most widely read of those is Postcards for Darjia, which received the Slovenian National Poetry Book Award.

Reading the poems collected in And Things Happen for the First Time, it is easy to see why Osojnik has received such acclaim. Imagistic, with subtle humor, the poems develop a direct vision of life's ironies, paradoxes, and contradictions.

Osojnik juxtaposes myth and the modesty of everyday life to create an effect that is akin to bathos, but only in the positive sense of the term. The sudden deflation of expectation, the puncturing of a myth, are all necessary in order to see reality, suggests Osojnik, and he is no fan of art used in the service of lies, cant, and moral suasion. In "The Hysterical Woman," Osojnik renders a snapshot of a woman existentially caught in a moment of horror. We are not allowed to see what is causing the horror—simply that she has witnessed too much and has become trapped in an emotional dynamic equivalent to Edvard Munch's The Scream. If one hopes for rescue from angels or entities on high, there is no such hope held out: "There are no giants here. Just a village commons. / Cash and carry. And silence." The silence of the village is evocative of villages purged by Serbs. The silence makes the scream all the more heart-rending.

Osojnik deals with genocide in blunt, uncompromising terms as in "Damnation to the Murderous Serbs," where evil becomes its own organism, with a heart, aorta, and circulatory system. This metaphor is frightening in its brilliance; it perfectly communicates the exigencies of evil, and why extirpating evil often means plucking the very heart from the body, resulting in certain death to the entire organism.

Other poems address the poet's quest for vision and spiritual unity, but in a way that acknowledges that an overblown sense of self is the quickest route to blindness. In "Dead Poet's Society," the narrator climbs Parnassus "wearing only Adidas / and shorts" and, thus garbed, is able to find the paths carved by the ancients. Humility leads to enlightenment here, and following his solitary sojourn, the narrator "return[s] to the valley. Pensive. Wind-blown. Emotional. / Daydreamed about you. Just like a classical / Greek hero. I watched the mountaintop. Sang softly."

The other poems in the collection are characterized by the same level of simplicity of spirit, honesty of intent. It is a lovely collection, accompanied by sketches that reinforce the simple, direct lines, the purity of feelings.

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Hank Lazer
Lavender Ink Press ($14.95)

by Cynthia Hogue

Known for his acute criticism as well as exploratory poetry, Hank Lazer is a poet who might be described as a stylistic risk-taker as well as forager in the treasure house of words. But how does an avant-garde poet, by definition one who pushes the genre to extremes, take poetic risks and experiment? Lazer has answered this question in his latest collection, Days, a series of ten-line poems written almost daily over the course of a year, in which he forays into the territory of the lyric. He writes in his brief afterword that Days is "an homage to workers in the short line," allowing a "return to musicality and lyricism that felt very joyous—a way away from some of the implicit do's and don't's of avant garde praxis; a means back into modes of beauty." Such an approach has produced an often genuinely beautiful and linguistically fascinating poetry.

Lyric, as a generically denotative term, is famously hard to define. What Lazer seems to mean by lyricism is not that the poems are conventionally lyrical (as in, for example, John Stuart Mills's notion of a solitary voice overheard in a garden), but rather that they have a timely immediacy (in Sharon Cameron's sense of "lyric time"). Lazer works closely with the music of words, but not with representational imagery; with the signifying swerves of short lines, but not with a particular lineality of thinking. In a recent essay on the poetry of Rae Armantrout, in fact, Lazer has theorized what he terms a "poetics of the swerve," that capacity of the poem to open (or swerve) to the sudden association—sometimes a visual, sometimes an aural or verbal link. As the following passage suggests, Lazer himself is exploring that poetics:

slow to slogan

voracious to

veracity amen

to mendacity

The power of these lines lies in the way a word that is meaningfully unrelated or even contrastive to another word can cause us to think of that other word through aural association. Such swerves allow Lazer deftly to play with the multiple meanings—"radiating infinite spokes"—that the coincidence of short lines and forced line breaks creates (for example, "veracity amen"; emphasis added).

Given that Days is a "daybook," the collection sustains a sense of being provisional, the "ecstatic witness" to a life in progress and in process. Some words are crossed out, others written in. There are handwritten dates for every poem and sometimes handwritten notes in the margins. The mind tracking its musings in these poems thinks about daily events through a language that leaps up and back and sideways rather than proceeds forward in an orderly fashion. Like all poetry, there is in these poems an intensified attention to language—for Lazer, a Poundian "dance of the intellect // paideuma of moving word icon"—that is interrupted by the very sense of lyric immediacy being contemplated. The poems quite literally "scatter" verbal effects, both enacting and interfering with, as one poem puts it,

a metaphysic of

this the still

lyrical interference

How exactly do they do this?

Take the middle line in the passage I just quoted as an example. This the still: the deictic points but does not actually refer to anything concrete. As an abstract noun, "the still" might be usefully associated with the captured-in-time, iconic quality of ekphrasis in painting. If we read the words in an enjambed sequence of three lines, however, "still" becomes an adverb or adjective rather than a noun: the still lyrical interference; or still, lyrical interference. But which word does "still" modify, "lyrical" or "interference"? Lazer exploits these meaningful shifts without determining them technically (as the addition of a comma and/or dash or a different line break would do).

This aspect of his work allows him to open the poems to more than the play of signification, as the following passage suggests:

. . . & means

of enumerating

sudden content

ment heart in

sists its history is now

& thus not history proper

Meaning unfolds into emotion's intensity ("heart in / sists its history is now") and then flits away, into another discursive tone ("& thus not history proper") as we read the lines as enjambed, rather than as discrete units.

Like the jazz improvisations that have in part inspired them, the form of these poems is the same (all the poems are ten lines), but the variations are endless. When taken together, the series comprises an epistemology of the quotidian that reveals it as rich with the large and the small. Lazer calls such a technique of inquiry, punningly, "hip gnosis" ("gnosis" in the sense of knowing). Wit like this delights and surprises throughout the volume.

Although the lyricism of this volume is surely the barest of bones, "stone soup" version, that spareness is oddly compelling. Lazer's sceneless poetry is as abstract and aware of the materiality of language as Dickinson, Stein, or Creeley (all of whom Lazer lists, among others, in his homage in the afterword). I take its honed pleasures, then, in the spirit of their poetics. I appreciate not only the play of, but also the politics that Lazer is able to uncover in the word—its malleable intonations and connotations, the music and meaning arising unexpectedly from aural echoes and associations, as in this brief sketch of the "adamic // american":

beginning over &

over      adamic

american impulse

insidious erasure

nationally tragic

habit counter

measure make audible

the rhyme

of mall and auction

block and so on

How many white poets, North or South, would allow so tangential an association as the assonance of "mall" and "auction" to move into significant historical consciousness?

Thus, for all the play of these poems, what draws me the most to Days is the near-spiritual urgency and ethical integrity of Lazer's poetic inquiry. They run like seams through the book, disrupting any stray "breathy epiphanies" (as Lazer wickedly and hilariously describes an "insipid" poetry reading). Like a tightrope walker, Lazer manages with aplomb to balance on the line between two aesthetics (in shorthand, Language and lyric), joyously con/fusing them, and refusing to decide whether "i'm as // far away from the // sacred as i've // ever been or it's // popping up here all // the time."

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Floyd Skloot
Bucknell University Press ($19.95)

by Lynnell Edwards

Floyd Skloot's third full-length collection of poetry reveals him again as a poet of strong narrative and formal command, best when imaging the myth and history of the almost modern artists and aristocracy of the 19th and early 20th century. The Fiddler's Trance opens with a commanding vision of Rasputin, appearing in the darkness of night dreams to the author, who after long illness finds himself "staring out the window at moonlit oaks" and sees Rasputin's beard "ruffle in a swirl of wind." It is a breathless beginning, a first sentence that runs nineteen lines long, punctuated with internal and occasional end rhyme, and perfectly managed stanza breaks. Ostensibly a muse, Rasputin is the first of a pageant of characters that make up the collection's strongest poems, including Odilon Redon, Sigmund Freud, Tsar Nikolas of Russia who "has been haunting the woods / all week," Juan Gris, and Robert Frost—who appears, like Rasputin, in the dark hours before dawn.

In these portraits, Skloot is at his best: wielding a tight control over the narrative line, masterfully capturing the cadence and the idiom of human speech, using the occasional stunning image to draw the scene, but always and most importantly telling a story. "Frost," arguably the strongest of the narrative poems, relies on humor as the poet converses with his poetic mentor in this surreal yet daylight clear exchange: "He leads me straight uphill. Baroque. / Folk. Roanoke. 'Awoke,' I say and he / stops dead to let me know who makes the rules." Here is a Frost we haven't quite imagined before. Still stronger in its story is the amazing "Behind Gershwin's Eyes," with short lines that run as breathless and sure as "Rhapsody in Blue" and detail the debilitating effects of a tumor on the composer's right temporal lobe. The final stunning stanza brings together the confusion of senses and the loss of reality in the artist's mind:

A blade of light
where the drawn shades
meet. Roses without odor,
icewater leaping from its cut
glass goblet, eyes leached
of luster in the shadowy
mirror of his brother's eyes.
He spread chocolates melted
in the oven of his palm
up his arms like an ointment,
and soon he was gone.

Skloot is generous with his exposition and epigraphs in each of these narratives, and readers will feel neither excluded nor snubbed for not being intimately familiar with the lives of these individuals.

The book does not consist entirely of portraits, however, and Skloot's method is not exclusively narrative. Still-lifes from the Pacific Northwest punctuate each section, but are less effective as a whole. Perhaps it is the burden of the nature poet striving to reach beyond regionalism to shake off the idealism, even the nostalgia for his own place that still trouble these pieces, which less surely investigate the natural world. If Robert Frost has immortalized New England for us, and James Still, Applachia, then Skloot's attempts to similarly offer the vistas of the Pacific Northwest fall short in this transcendent quality. Generally lacking conflict, they depend too heavily on "Lean dusky Alaskan geese nibbling grass / seed in his field, early daffodils, three / fawns moving across his lawn in the last / of afternoon light" (from "Gift") and "a white horse wearing half / its winter coat shivers / in the sundown wind," (from "Beyond Grande Ronde") or "a swollen / sun pinned on the tip of Mount Hood / and bleeding alpenglow" (from "Cipole Road in Early Spring").

But the narratives themselves are fearless, and carry the book. They often blur the line between the real and the imagined interior life of the artist, particularly the artist who battles against a disease that is slowly stealing his vision. The metaphor is perhaps easy to read, and the translation from Skloot's own long struggle with illness perhaps obvious, but the unexpected combinations of action, dialogue and image show the idea anew, and with hope that radiates above the chaos and fray like the "tangerines / filling a crystal compote / on the marble-topped bar / of the Folies-Bergère / in the last large work / by Edouard Manet" who looked for and found "a sign of life / that grief would not distort" (from "The Tangerines"). So too, the Fiddler has found that sign of life in this latest work, singing best through the voice of others.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2002 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2002

Bin Ramke
Iowa University Press ($16)

by Dan Beachy-Quick

Anaxagoras—a philosopher to whom poet Bin Ramke repeatedly returns—differed from his predecessors in one extremely important way. Rather than searching for the origin of the world in an earthly element (water, air, fire, dirt), Anaxagoras claimed that the universe was kept in order by the power of Mind (nous). The source of all is no longer at hand in the clod of soil, not in the tip of flame heating air, but rather can be found in all these, and elsewhere too. The genuine world—the ontological world—is nowhere and in all things, hidden and ubiquitous at once.

Such is this poet's world, our world, in which we strike for wisdom where we can, and hope for illuminating resonance in return. If Mind lurks in the universe turning considerations into constellations, then surely the language that bears our thinking shares in the order(ing) of the world. And it is in that sense of order—order extending from the stellar dust that collapsed into this planet to string theory and ultraviolet wavelengths, from childhood to parenthood, from public to private life—that Ramke so sincerely and beautifully attends.

The first motion of that attention rises to a height that can almost encompass the world:

and from the air, from the airplane I saw
I saw beneath me during that time (I think it was time)
of year I saw the fall of the leaves around each tree separate

To the poet at Apolline heights, each tree in death speaks its death, and each is clear, discrete, distinct. But this speaking is different than we might suppose: "the tree speaking not to me only to itself like God." No privilege of vision, no gift of the land unfolding from a plane window, offers an entrance into the thinking of the world we live in (we do not live above it). Ramke descends as far as he's risen; to speak always risks corrupting what we speak of, always threatens "a further fall." On the other hand, to speak, to poem the world, Ramke says, is to stand inside the "calling" of all things that surround themselves "with vibrating molecules / known as noise." The poet can risk his own disharmony.

Ramke ends his first poem with Lear's response to Cordelia's honest silence: "You recall, Nothing / will come of nothing." The allusion serves as more than threat; it echoes forward through the book as a Pre-Socratic fragment. This "nothing" is tangible, and if nothing births nothing, then the vacuum that nature abhors is a vacuum that is possible. The poem speaks against such a nothing, ultimately asking: what is?

The question is as personal as it is universal in Ramke's book. Indeed, as Airs, Waters, Places progresses, the tangle of the stellar, the private, the mathematical and the matrimonial, is allowed to become more tangled, "A little like love, Dear." In "Zoo" that tangling begins:

a formula        flies thrown through the
air arced                     adhesion of

things attach to           fact     there is real
and there is not not     is a

difference                   the imagined is a kind
of real                         memory too

there was
a day I                        was a small child

The child who dreamed of math for comfort becomes the adult whose comfort is in remembering being a child. This comfort is not solace. It's the recognition that what was lived and what was imagined attach themselves to the world in a manner that is real. The arcing formula adheres to life, carries life along with it.

The strange complexity of such attachment is that life feels anything but individual. The fact outlives the thing; the child outlives the day. And yet—half-miracle, half-torment—all is at hand. From "Zoo": "I should have remembered the war it happened / two years before my birth." The self is not the boundary of experience. The self is permeable, a dashed-line, a definition to keep in question:

I whistle and the poem unfolds
a kind

of pose, a kindness exposed,
. . . is a story a sequence a word
and a word and yet still the pool
reflects

the face of posed Narcissus
he is knowledge he is Adam
he is home alone . . .

Ramke keeps himself in his gaze—in actual reflection more often than self-reflection. This gazing into the water, this Adamic naming and knowledge, infiltrates the form of some poems; they bifurcate, calling into question the other half:

Someone tell the neighbors someone
drink to her life in the light. My
life hath been one love—no blot it out
My life hath been one chain
of contradictions . . .

I watch through the
pane
on such a day my face
against, the breath as I speak
to myself the words freeze

Here, the two lines of the poem run parallel, intersecting only by the will of the reader. Elsewhere, as in "Surface Tension" (a poem in concert with the cover's painting) the two halves reflecting each other relate:

in a lake-a litter of leaves
the pages a book in her one hand
legs might be cold she wears
above the water the girl reads

Here: think of a girl standing
surrounds her, she is reading
she is doubled—wavery—radiating—her
a dress the hemline
what she believes—

Words frozen on a pane obscure the face of who spoke them. The girl reading in the river wavers; her book is filled with tears. Tears are "me down my cheek" falling. The book is as much a surface of reflection as Narcissus's pond, but Ramke points out there is no simple staring at anything—least of all, our own beauty. The universe intervenes—its thinking ripples and fractures the surface. Ramke records those fractures not as breaks, but as connections.

Ramke continually turns toward collage—of his own voice and of others interrupting the speaking voice. He writes:

Those are not tears on the page those are tears on the page. Water Marks. Shadows. Those are tears on the page. That is a splash

But the page is not torn. Ramke collects other thoughts, other words. He sees a poem, any poem, joins in the equation of every poem. We speak, Anaxogoras speaks. The whole world lives in one mouth. All speaking becomes Nous: the Mind that orders the world. It cannot help but be so. Talking to ourselves we say each other's words. What we hear, Ramke says, when we listen, if we listen, is not one voice in aria, no—we hear the harmony amassing.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2002 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2002