Richard Watson
David R. Godine ($35)

by Brian Charles Clark

René Descartes' life and times have been gone over with a fine tooth comb. Within a few decades of his death, in 1650, the first biography appeared: La Vie de Monsieur Des-Cartes (1691). A steady stream of biographies have appeared since then—though none, as Richard Watson points out in his amusing, contentious, and contemplative new biography, have offered much in the way of new information. Rather, biographers have tended to tender theories about how or why Descartes did thus or such, and especially as to why Descartes was (or still is) a Great Man.

Watson takes a different tack: he writes as a skeptic, placing the Great Man theories in doubt. As well they should be, of course: Descartes did contribute to the formation of modern science and analytical philosophy, but got things off on the wrong foot with his silly notion of a mind and a body the twain of which shall never meet.

Descartes' great contribution was instead the very skeptical method that Watson now turns on his previous biographers, especially those of the "Saint Descartes Protection Society," as he calls many of them with tongue in cheek. Remarkably, there are still those who would claim that, for instance, Descartes died a good Catholic, or that he never stole an idea from a friend, or that the three famous dreams that led to the invention of his analytical geometry really did all happen the way his hagiographers say it did.

Descartes, Watson persuasively argues, was a Catholic in name only. If you had Descartes' ideas and were writing the things he did at the time he did, you'd wear that badge too. Galileo was being censored and held under house arrest by the Church during Descartes' lifetime; Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for heresy in 1600; and Sir Walter Raleigh had his head chopped off for atheism. Good reason to walk the walk and talk the talk, at least when the powers that be were paying attention. This is precisely why, Watson argues, that Descartes lived most of his life in relatively liberal Holland, avoiding the contretemps of the Counter-reformation in his native France.

As for "borrowing" ideas, Descartes seems to have cribbed most of his first treatise (on music and musical tunings) from his mentor Isaac Beeckman. At least, explains Watson, that accounts for the row between the two men that lasted for years. And the famous dreams in which he "saw" the outline of analytical geometry? It reeks of myth-making to Watson, but as he fairly acknowledges people do, and not infrequently, solve major problems in their dreams.

One strength of Watson's biography is his willingness to doubt. Again, this is the gift of Descartes, and we can only wish that such doubt be cast upon his dualism. The other main strength of this book, and what makes it a reader's pleasure, is Watson's travelogue. Over the course of many years and sabbaticals, Watson and his wife literally followed in Descartes' footsteps, visiting the many small towns in Holland where Descartes once lived. This makes for a peculiar and fascinating sort of biography: of Descartes, about whom everything is already known that can be, but also of Watson, the philosopher on the trail of the father of modern philosophy.

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Katherine Monk
forward by Atom Egoyan
Raincoast Books ($18.95)

by Brian K. Bergen-Aurand

After only a few titles and a handful of directors, such as David Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan, Michael Snow, and Norman Jewison, many filmgoers' cachés concerning Canadian cinema run dry. Thankfully, Katherine Monk's book can alleviate that arid condition. Composed of thematically driven chapters, biographical profiles and filmographies, studies of various Canadian film movements, and reviews of 100 Canadian films, Weird Sex and Snowshoes has the power to increase, exponentially, a reader's knowledge of the subject. The first such excursion into Canadian cinema since Martin Knelman's 1977 This is Where We Came In, Monk's study updates Knelman's popular approach and provides an array of facts and factoids concerning the English and French Canadian filmmaking traditions. Running over much of the same ground as Christopher E. Gittings's Canadian National Cinema (Routledge, 2002), but in a less academic manner, Weird Sex is an interesting primer and valuable catalog for beginning a journey into this cinema today.

Monk, originally from Montreal, is now a Vancouver-based arts journalist who has had brief experiences in low-budget filmmaking. She wrote Weird Sex to inform people about Canadian film and encourage them to engage with it—not to provide an exhaustive survey of all its history and complexity. In that light, the book takes sweeping looks at this national cinema and the "identity crisis" of Canada in order to show viewers how to watch the films, respect them, and eventually love them. Written for the "masses," its hope is to capture the essence of the experience of Canadian cinema by communicating a large amount of critical and cultural study to a popular audience.

Weird Sex is difficult to read straight through, though, due to the sweeping generalizations and cloudy descriptions that surface in the thematically driven chapters. Even after repeated reading, a good deal of this book remains unclear. For example, when summarizing the essential difference between Canadian and Hollywood cinema, Monk writes about the birth of the Canadian Film Board and how its formation under the Scottish documentarist John Grierson's leadership has left a permanent mark on Canadian filmmaking.

In this Scotsman's mind, film was not—in any way, shape or form—supposed to be a vehicle for mindless entertainment aimed at making oodles of box-office cash or building a completely bogus national identity. Therein lies the seminal difference between Canadian and American film: Canada's tradition grew out of an institution and a socialist-minded idea of showing Canadians honest reflections of themselves. The American, or Hollywood, film tradition began as a collective dream in the minds of several Jewish immigrants who were possessed by a desire to create pure fantasy and to reinvent the American Dream as an accessible, if entirely ethereal, ideal.

The binary between United States (Hollywood) and Canadian filmmaking is clear, and Monk holds to this opposition through most of the remainder of the book. What are not so clear, however, are the details of statements such as this one. Has Canadian cinema never been driven by profit? Has Hollywood only ever been? What is the relation between "institutional" and "collective" filmmaking when the word "collective" carries such positive significance in so many other (national) film histories? What is Monk implying by the phrase "Jewish immigrants," and how is their immigration different from that of Grierson? Many such unclear passages remain unresolved throughout the body of this text.

In the end, this book is most valuable in small doses, for its brief discussions of particular films, movements, and filmmakers from different Canadian filmmaking traditions. The reviews at the end serve as nice introductions to 100 Canadian films and provide a solid list for those who might want to learn more about this national cinema from the films themselves.

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Kevin J. Hayes
University of Nebraska Press ($28)

by Doug Nufer

George Nellis (1865-1948) rode a bicycle from New York state to San Francisco in 1887. He covered 3369 miles in 72 days, setting an imprecise but impressive transcontinental cycling record. He rode about ten hours and wrote up to three hours a day, partly paying his way by mailing dispatches to his hometown newspapers and a national cycling magazine. Using these articles and other accounts of that trip, Kevin Hayes tells Nellis's story in a way that makes sense of this fantastic journey, but the more we learn of this feat, the more fantastic it seems.

To begin with, consider the bicycle: a 52-inch, high-wheeled Columbia Expert, with tubular steel frame, hard rubber tires, direct drive (i.e., the pedals spun when you coasted), and a seat mounted next to the handlebars. Hayes compares the gear ratio of the high wheeler to second gear on a touring bike—sensible for transcontinental riding, as was Nellis's loaded bike weight of 42 pounds—but when he describes the posture that expert riders went into when going downhill, slinging legs over the handlebars, 19th-century cycling seems like a sport for circus performers. And, while airless tires made flats a thing of the future, it's truly amazing that Nellis had no mechanical breakdowns. As for physical mishaps, high wheelers were notorious for throwing their riders. The 21-year-old Nellis had his share of "headers" (he wore a helmet, we learn late in the book), but suffered no serious injuries.

Then there were the roads. As he got farther west, these deteriorated. At best, none were as smooth as today's pavement; for the most part, surfaces were gravel, sand, or dirt. Rain quickly turned the unpaved route to mud, so that the cyclist didn't so much ride as, in the parlance of the time, "push a bicycle" along. To find the best routes, Nellis relied on tips which often went nowhere, leading him to haul his bike over to the railroad tracks and then hobble over the ties for miles to the next town.

When he arrived in town or any farm along the way, Nellis could usually count on the hospitality of strangers. Sometimes he paid for room and board and often he found himself the honored guest of the city or local bicycle club, whose members enjoyed facilities as lavish as any private club. As Hayes points out, at $125, the Columbia Expert cost about what the average factory worker made in three months. In other words, the clubby wheelmen of 19th-century America were not factory workers, a class distinction Nellis drives home by using the royal we in his dispatches for publication. Hayes highlights an exceptional occasion when Nellis meets a farmer (i.e., someone who works hard for a living and not for, as the farmer notes, self-aggrandizement) who suffers the gentleman cyclist to sleep in the barn, refuses to feed him, and makes him take water from the animal trough.

For today's bikers, what's strangest about this trip may not be anything Nellis did or encountered, but what was absent: cars (the gentle wheelmen of that era did, however, complain about traffic when horse-powered vehicles got in their way). He was also spared wars, although some locals kidded Nellis about being attacked by Indians if he took a certain route. He did shoot and kill a coyote that licked his face when he was trying to sleep, however, and was chased by a bull.

As well as Hayes evokes the culture of changing frontier, his version of Nellis's story lacks some particulars that today's long distance riders may crave. There's a fine drawing of the bicycle and plenty of background on how it was made, distributed, and popularized, but not enough information on Nellis's bike nor on the nitty-gritty aspects of his trip. How did the brakes work, how did he make do with a single suit of (wool?) clothes, and how did he keep from dying of thirst in his long crossings of territory without rivers?

Nellis's general accounts for newspaper readers and insider low-downs for bikers perhaps omitted these mundane details, either because the details would clutter his stylish travelogue or his readers were familiar with what we may find strange. A bibliography at the end of An American Cycling Odyssey, 1887 can direct readers who want more, but, to be perfectly unfair to Hayes and his publisher, I wonder whether a more apt revue of this gargantuan accomplishment wouldn't have been a reprinting of all of Nellis's articles, complete with a longer critical analysis by Hayes as well as some articles about Nellis by his contemporaries. What Hayes has done, however, is muster information from a fascinating range of sources in order to tell a remarkable story.

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Caetano Veloso
Translated by Isabel de Sena
Alfred A. Knopf ($26)

by Dimitri Kaasan

It is said that American pop stars are bereft of inner lives. So befuddled are they by the din of fans, their own personae as projected by the media, and the difficulty of authentic intimacy behind closed doors, that their faculties of contemplation and emotional self-awareness are all but lost. Call it a side effect of global influence—the same phenomenon, perhaps, that inhibits belletrists in the United States from seeking or winning public office.

It's fitting, then, that the Tropicalia movement Caetano Veloso's Tropical Truth chronicles was launched in response to American cultural hegemony as personified by the likes of Elvis Presley. Veloso writes near the outset of his memoir that his generation took up this task as their "right to imagine an ambitious intervention in the future of the world." Yet in the chapters that follow he recounts how this measured bombast gave way to a different attitude toward American rock and roll. Beginning in the late '60s Veloso and a handful of co-provocateurs from his native state of Bahia responded to American hegemony using the trope of cannibalism—that is, they opted not to reject but to devour all influences both native and foreign: rock, the fetishized themes of Brazilian backwardness, the cinematic and poetic concerns of the Brazilian avant-garde, and of course, bossa nova.

The sound they aspired to bring forth was "something transcendent" and truly Brazilian. Once realized, however, the music and the movement it gave voice to scandalized Brazilian Leftists and conservatives alike. Veloso and Tropicalia co-founder Gilberto Gil were heckled at shows, and soon thereafter were imprisoned and exiled by the Brazilian government. The story of how Tropicalia was seeded, how it blossomed, and how it dissolved after a few short years, only to transform every subsequent branch of popular Brazilian music—all this hangs from the framework of Veloso's memoir. His fluid shifts from "I" to "we" show the extent of the Tropicalistas' shared sense of mission, though at times the "we" dilates to include his whole generation, and at other it narrows to only Veloso and Gilberto Gil.

That this memoir avoids solipsism—a quality almost intrinsic to the genre—is remarkable in itself. But Veloso's ample dramatis personae comes from more than an impulse to share credit for the disruptions Tropicalia brought to Brazilian culture. His writing reveals a simple joy in portraiture, whether he is describing his lifelong worship of bossa nova forefather Joao Gilberto, his wrenching estrangement from his one-time literary idol, Clarice Lispector, or his startlingly beautiful description of his lifelong friend Gilberto Gil.

These are larger than life characters engaged in struggles for the destiny of a country, and Veloso makes deft use of their innate drama. He can in one moment assume a wry, tragicomic tone, as when he describes his posse's raucous strategy sessions for making their music "more commercial so it could serve revolutionary purposes." In other scenes his prose is that of a dirge, or, as in the case of his and Gil's imprisonment prior to exile, that of existential horror. Such range of technique make this memoir a page-turner.

If it is the paradox of the performer/intellectual that engages the readers' interest, it is Veloso's confessional passages that deepen the paradox, endow it with breath and blood. He writes, for example, that he swore off psychedelic drugs because of a few bad trips, yet he describes each of those trips with the richness of DeQuincy on opium or Benjamin on hashish. He professes disgust about the way sex pervades consumer culture, but describes masturbation as an almost mystical prerogative. An avowed heterosexual and monogamist, Veloso has publicly cross-dressed and flirted with homoeroticism, claiming that if, at age 19, he had fallen in love with another man, he would've made "a great queer."

The passages that lag in Tropical Truth are those where Veloso over-indulges not his intimate, but his intellectual voice. His mini-essays on poetry, modern art, and film, while fascinating and relevant to Tropicalia, occasionally seem to grope for the mantles of his several would-be vocations (professor, painter, filmmaker.) Still, his assessments are consistently persuasive. His description of the asonorities of English, for example, would be offensive to native speakers if they were not so astute. Ultimately, the reader is gratified for even his analytical pyrotechnics, because it is in the crucible of his intellect that Veloso distills such truths as:

Stravinsky and Schoenberg seem to intend not that we stop listening to Bach in order to listen to them, but rather that we become better listeners of Bach for having listened to them...Never before modernism has art been so conservative.

These are truths unconstrained by the tropics from whence they came. They are insights that render the label of "pop star" too slight for Veloso, whose inner life, as revealed in Tropical Truth, has the density and fire of an imploding sun.

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Edited by Edward Foster and Joseph Donahue
Talisman House ($25.95)

by Chris McCreary

In The World in Time and Space, Alan Golding's closing essay "New, Newer, and Newest American Poetries" surveys the numerous major anthologies of 20th-century innovative writing that all position themselves, in one way or another, as the true heir to Donald Allen's seminal The New American Poetry. Expanding on an argument by Marjorie Perloff, Golding astutely notes that these anthologies are often focused on "historicizing" their poetic projects and reinforcing established careers instead of introducing rising writers as was the case with the Allen anthology. Timing, it seems, is of the essence when documenting the ever-evolving history of contemporary poetry.

It's of no small significance that "time" appears twice within this volume's full title. While The World in Time and Space, presented as issues 23 through 26 of the journal Talisman, is often retrospective in its focus, it does not dwell on the past; instead, it is about the threads connecting the various schools and stances to be found within the last 50 years of experimental poetry, including that which is being written today. The volume's editors are wise to begin their subtitle "Towards a History"—in no way do they claim that this volume of reviews, interviews, and essays is comprehensive, despite its 740 pages. The version of history that is put forth here is particular to the aesthetic that Talisman House has been so impressively mapping for well over a decade. It is a family tree that certainly shares members with other existing histories, but the emphasis is redirected, and those who are generally considered secondary figures stand in the spotlight.

William Bronk emerges, not surprisingly, as the anthology's most central figure. Talisman House has published more than half a dozen collections of the prolific poet's work, and The World in Time and Space is dedicated in his memory (Bronk passed away in 1999); the volume's title is pulled from one of his poems, which appears here as well. Aside from being the focal point of David Clippinger's "Poetry and Philosophy at Once: Encounters between William Bronk and Postmodern Poetry," Bronk appears, at least briefly, in several other pieces. He emerges as a crucial influence who was at the same time an "anomaly," sharing an affinity with several schools of poetry yet not fitting neatly within any of their confines. Tracing Bronk's influence, Clippinger links his philosophical poetics to the work of writers such as Susan Howe, Michael Palmer, and Rosmarie Waldrop. Elsewhere, Peter O'Leary includes Bronk in his innovative take on the gnostic tradition, which he also expands to encompass poets such as Howe, Nathaniel Mackey, and Robert Duncan as well as Ronald Johnson and Frank Samperi, two poets who figure somewhat less prominently but still crucially in the canon put forth by this collection. Leonard Schwartz's essay on Duncan, then, traces his lineage through Palmer, Mackey, and younger poets such as Eleni Sikelianos. As the essays progress, the overlapping of these circles becomes even more apparent.

Around this nexus, then, other essays and reviews provide broader surveys of poetic strains ranging from the Objectivists and Language poets to slam poetry and visual writing. While much of the focus is on poets who emerged in the 1970s, the poetic trajectory at times includes more recent generations as well. In "Neo-Surrealism; or, The Sun at Night," Andrew Joron tracks surrealist tendencies in poets such as Philip Lamantia, one-time youthful protégé of the original Surrealist circle, through John Yau and up to younger poets such as Kristin Prevallet, Jeff Clark, Brian Lucas, and Garrett Caples. Steve Evans targets the late 1980s as the beginnings of a reworking of avant-garde practices by a new grouping of poets that truly came into their own by the middle of the 1990s. He focuses discussion on a cluster of six younger poets—Kevin Davies, Lisa Jarnot, Bill Luoma, Rod Smith, Lee Ann Brown, Jennifer Moxley—that form a loosely-knit confederacy despite their lack of manifestos or an official "school."

It must be pointed out that in the version of history presented by this collection, women are something of a minority. A tally of the contributors list reveals that only a quarter of the volume's contributors are women. The inclusion of an essay by Perloff is a given—at this point, no collection of work on contemporary poetry would seem complete without one—and an interview with Alice Notley further reaffirms her importance within both the Talisman House stable of favorite writers and contemporary poetry in general. And while Howe is frequently a focal point, there are some other women whose work would seem to deserve closer analysis. Anne Waldman, for instance, is credited in this volume's Introduction with ascribing the term "outriders" to innovative American poets, and she appears briefly as a historical figure in several of the pieces collected here, but no essay or review gives in-depth consideration to her writing. It seems ironic, then, that Mary Margaret Sloan writes in "Of Experience and Experiment: Women's Innovative Writing 1965-1995" that in recent decades "avant-garde anthologies have gradually included more and more women until in the 1990s, many collections represent women's work in nearly equal quantities as men's, and in a few cases, the works of even slightly more women than men." In the context of this essay, it is difficult not to see the contributors list of The World in Time and Space as something of a throwback to an earlier, more male-dominated time. Sloan's essay gives attention to many of the essential women writers who are neglected elsewhere in the collection, but the piece is stretched to its limits, eventually resorting to lists of female poets' names when at least some of these poets deserve fuller consideration in a volume of this anthology's size and scope.

While the disproportionate number of men contributing to the anthology is too striking to ignore, by no means should this collection have attempted to be all things to all readers. In his introduction to the Angel Hair Anthology, itself an impressively large collection that pulls together work from Waldman and Lewis Warsh's groundbreaking 1960s small press, Warsh writes that "(w)riting poetry criticism during the late sixties was to associate oneself with an academic world, and a tone of voice, which was considered inimical to the life of poetry itself." A sea change has obviously occurred in the world of experimental poetry since those days; today, many poet-scholars publish critical work alongside more traditional members of academia. Numerous journals are dedicated entirely to poetics, and high-profile presses such as the University of Alabama Press and Wesleyan University Press regularly publish a wide variety of critical writing on poetry. With such a wealth of poetry anthologies and critical work already in print, surely part of the editor's job today is to decide what constraints to place on a project so that it is somehow differentiated from the other volumes already on the shelves. When editing The Art of Practice: 45 Contemporary Poets, for instance, Dennis Barone and Peter Ganick limited the anthology's range by deliberately choosing poets whose work had not been included in the earlier anthologies In The American Tree or "Language" Poetries. Thankfully, too, volumes such as American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language, edited by Claudia Rankine and Juliana Spahr, and We Who Love to Be Astonished: Experimental Women's Writing and Performance Poetics, edited by Laura Hinton and Cynthia Hogue, provide some necessary consideration of today's innovative women writers.

While some of what's included in The World in Time and Space has already been said elsewhere in more depth and some key figures are left out, what emerges is the aesthetic of Talisman House, one of the most vital publishing projects of the 20th century and beyond. The project is admirable, even if it inevitably leaves stones unturned. One can only assume that there are other editors currently preparing more volumes to round out the larger, more comprehensive history of the spaces to be found within contemporary poetry.

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Alicia Suskin Ostriker
University of Pittsburgh Press ($12.95)

by Julie Drake

If a reader is very lucky, maybe once a year will she come across a book of poetry that will change how she views the world. As 2002 comes to a close, this reader is happy to report the volcano sequence is that book.

Ostriker's tenth volume of poetry begins with a section whose title could aptly sum up the entire book—"ruthless radiance"—and with a poem, "volcano," that lets us know this will not be a "feel-good" book, but that instead, it will burn:

the volcano is a crack in the earth
the volcano is a bulge over a crack
a fault line runs under it

something terrible happens
and the magma
coughs out

hot beauty
thick and magnificent rage
so what if afterward

everything is dead

Ostriker has been called "a poet...who was raised an atheist (Jewish atheist—a special strand) and is seeking god—or the poems are." In this book, the poems continue the search for god, or rather it should be said they find god, as several of them carry on a conversation with him, as in "during the bombing of Kosovo":

and you, you—
father of rain
what are you thinking

~

the spot of black paint
in the gallon of white
makes it whiter

so the evil impulse
is part of you
for a reason

what reason

greater wilder holiness

Ostriker also converses with the feminine emanation of god, or the Shekhinah; in one of the book's most provocative poems, "the volcano breathes," the volcano image returns in a turbulent scene of birth, and the conversation continues:

like wolf swallowing grandmother [the being
called] god the father swallowed god the mother,...

...from the source the desire
is to flow without cease
I do have a heavy burden
and cannot wait to put it down

~

to put it down is forbidden

Although Ostriker is known as a Midrashist (interpreter of the Torah) as well as a poet, not all the poems in the volcano sequence deal with the religious. Many of the strongest poems here deal with the everday world, and Ostriker's handling of it—as in her "interlude" poems—shows her poetic craft at its finest. The words are simple, the line-breaks exact, and the effect is quite moving, whether she writes of an aging mother,

hands folded under your chin, staring
at nothing, preparing to be blind
and helpless, for fifty years
it has tortured me that I cannot save you from madness
and that I do not love you enough

or beggars:

Why not say
beggars?
Why invent novelty phrases like "the homeless"
as if our situation were modern and special

instead of ancient and normal,
the problem of greed and selfishness?

Ostriker tackles language as powerfully as she tackles religion or issues age-old yet still relevant. the volcano sequence is a book literally erupting with powerful poems, a book that burns wildly like a barely-contained fire, from the opening lines right up to the closing "coda":

sometimes the stories take you and fling you against the wall
sometimes you go right through the wall

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Joshua Beckman and Matthew Rohrer
Verse Press ($10)

by Jen Bervin

When Joshua Beckman and Matthew Rohrer read together at the St. George Poetry Festival in September, they asked the audience to provide topics for improvised poems. Amid anticipatory silence that crackled with palpable energy, they took turns meting out a single word (or line, according to the chosen constraint) into the microphone. Even if some of the impromptu poems missed the mark, the experiment provided a valuable template by which to read their similarly composed book, Nice Hat. Thanks.—a silence in which words flail, becoming urgent and surprisingly funny. Sounded out piece by shiny, sudden piece, the poems sound and feel nomadic; they wander deliciously, probe curiously, then unpredictably turn on a heel (pardon the pun):

Choose me,
little shoe.

The tight parameter of the compositional restraint (alternating words or lines) combined with a pre-determined number of lines (two through five) exerts an interesting pressure on the short poems, particularly when a penchant for symmetry is thrown into the mix. Less satisfying are the "long" poems (poems exceeding five lines) which become slack in almost direct proportion to their length. Perhaps this demonstrates the outer limit of the experiment. Overall, their method is winning because it is manipulated with dexterity and aplomb by two nimble poets with a spry sense of humor and a refreshing willingness to set aside their artistic egos. There is little likeness between the collaborative poems and the work Beckman and Rohrer have published separately. I believe the authors when they write, "Our method turned us into another guy."

It's evident that pleasure is one of the guiding principles in Nice Hat. Thanks. The authors seem to enjoy life immensely, and enjoy writing about it too. Mischievous, sexy poems reminiscent of Catullus crop up:

I'll follow the girl now
and offer her peanuts
and wear out her pockets
I'll follow the girl now

Some of the humor veers toward the wicked: "Marty come back, / the hole is bigger." Pleasingly strange poems stay conceivably close to the realm of possibility, with smart flourishes: "That girl's doll / eats rice / from that girl's hand. // It was designed / well."

In prose that is wonderfully lean, simple, and suggestive, the authors call a spade a spade: "I was cleaning / when I realized you had made me do it /with your horrible nuance / I was cleaning". They weigh in (lightly) on the state of the environment ("2002. Still more trees than people, / and more water than trees"), political rhetoric ("America wins / every time/ a bird dies"), and New York ("I love New York / more than you, /buddy. // Take that shirt / back to Jersey"). The book was written throughout the five boroughs; it's peopled with overtaxed New Yorkers ("We're busy. / We're happy. / We're utterly pale"), and fueled by the city's youthful exuberance: "Light coming down from that divine cloud we call New York turned us on... Dreams begin in New York and today we are in New York." Amen to that, gentlemen. Carry on.

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Jennifer Moxley
Edge Books ($12.50)

by Arielle Greenberg

Although it doesn't engage in the coy cleverness and pranks pulled by many of her "emerging" poetic peers, Jennifer Moxley's second full-length collection, The Sense Record, is absolutely postmodern, evoking a world in which Eros appears outside a two-car garage. It's also a hard book, the way Henry James feels hard—one suspects that even the author might not be up to the task of dissecting her own curvilinear sentences. But the effort is worthwhile, because that altogether too-rare phenomenon is happening here: a radically new poetic voice.

I'd recommend that readers approach the collection through the title poem, the penultimate work in the book, in which the above-mentioned Eros makes an appearance. Like much of the other work here, "The Sense Record" is a carefully controlled blend of highly formal diction, diurnal minutiae, ruptured syntax, and epistemological queries into life, love and art, as in these lines:

Do I hold a sword or am I a ghost,
marking the tedium between
drunken midnight, wistful sunrise
blood-mouth metronome beats
between here and deep unconsciousness
a sea of little niggling tasks.

At once edgy and archaic, Moxley uses traditional meter and Romantic imagery to inform poems that ask urgent questions about class and community in the contemporary world. In the first poem, "Grain of the Cutaway Insight," the speaker wishes to connect with a loved one through poetry, but claims "My thoughts are too awkward, too erratic to rest / at ease in the beautiful iamb." Likewise, Moxley's wandering ideas seem far too restless to be confined to pretty formalism, and yet she relies on form, making it modern in ways that feel both natural and stylized. But philosophically, Moxley is no neo-formalist: in both her own poems and in the work she has published as an editor, she is fully committed to the avant-garde and its legacy, a stance that pervades The Sense Record even when she writes sonnets in perfect pentameter, like "Against Aubade":

Should morning's snubbed forsaken purpose come
in love's complacent orbit to relent
and to our bid for endless time succumb
could we believe ourselves the more content?

Her use of such craft is not ironic, but it does startle: by including the kinds of poems least expected to be published by the fiercely avant-garde Edge Books, Moxley invites the reader to question the nature of beauty, of limitations, and of the modern. And in doing so, she makes the poems in The Sense Record revelatory: the words are smoothed into classical shapes, only to highlight said shapes' syntactical and systematic ruptures. In many of the poems, Moxley seems to turn on herself, questioning her own epiphanies, and so the raw energy that results feels true to the content. It also serves to enliven some of the more academic-sounding verse; every time the poems flirt with being too girded or unemotional, Moxley imbues them with surprising evidence of a real life, American and specific. This happens in the love poem "Impervious to Starlight," which begins abstractly enough with

The predicament of this business
inheres in moments of mistrust
the turn from the heart of easy youth
to a soul-hungry adequate frame
rocked in vacant luxury
to the half-sleep of slight regrets

only to move, in the next stanza, to a "legend" in which

my father left his piñata profits
in the removable tray of the old strongbox,
destroying, off in the ideal ether,
his daily offerings to leisure,
and lining his restive patio life
with decrepit forms of remorse.

Although I am not always sure how to follow them, I have a great deal of respect for these kind of leaps, as well as for the sure-footed way Moxley is able to slip in and out of an almost apocryphal diction. Later, in "Impervious to Starlight," she invokes, during a kind of dream sequence, the advertising slogan "(but wait, there's more)" and then proceeds to use italics in an eerily Biblical manner:

we saw a long corridor,
of haunted lawn, there was a vessel
of pocked marble atop a pedestal,
out of which came a few fragrant heads,
red, fluttering paper leaves

Another characteristic of Moxley's work, one she shares with other interesting younger poets like D.A. Powell and Rachel Zucker, is a sort of backlash against the Language-influenced fragment: rather than cutting her lines into slivers, she extends them beyond their breaking point, creating a kind of "ultra line" that is as subversive-seeming as the fragment, but with a more fluid, nobler outcome. In "The Second Winter," she begins a thought "The na•ve occasion of that first winter / repeats like a charm of personal woe" and does not end it until seven lines later with "metamorphoses, which move off trace / unto design, replacing silhouettes / with more enduring forms of loveliness." The line, like the loveliness, endures.

In poems of immense confidence and scope, Moxley's voice surfaces as ambitious and original, at once deeply immersed in the past and utterly forward-looking. The Sense Record is a document of poetry on the brink.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2002/2003 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2002/2003

Molly Peacock
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. ($26.95)

by Corinne Robins

Cornucopia, a collection centered on the richness of love and pain, examines the role of woman as sex object from the female point of view, its elegant verse forms laying out for the reader the joys and burdens of familial and sensual love. Sex is the all-inclusive road, the way. On the book jacket, Robert Creeley states the book proves Molly Peacock's "genius for saying the most necessary things." He's right: Cornucopia offers the reader a kind of "wisdom poetry", poems whose insights inspire a momentary pause created by the light of recognition. But there are no moral adages here. In Peacock's work nothing is allowed to remain abstract. Her wisdom and morality are grounded in an unsparing sensuality that in turn is grounded in exactitude. The reach of her body, the richness of her experience, leads her to conclude, "Life's cache is flesh, flesh, flesh."

The artist Matisse once explained that he didn't paint objects but the relations between objects, and this same facility is the source of the power of Peacock's narrative poems. To name two examples, "Subway Vespers" and "Good-bye Hello in the East Village" offer transitional situations transformed by the poet's personal insight, insight born of a sharp-eyed unflinching honesty that delights in self-discovery. Both are story poems, but the stories turn in upon themselves, hinged by an underlying philosophical morality. Then there are the poems that are the poet's dialogues with herself, poems that go beyond questions of morality. From the new poems in the volume, The Land Of The Shí, "Repair" describes our inner breakdowns, minor losses, and self-destructions that take place over the "dim peeling of years." Peacock is unsparing of herself and her readers when it comes to the psychic damage that piles up over our heads. From the ironic "Repair" on the one hand, and the frightening "The Hunt" on the other, she sums up extremes of the human condition—inescapable conditions that apply to us all.

Peacock has opted to pack her rather savage insights into the most refined and formal verse forms. The rhymes are often a miracle of fancy footwork, where sound balances the poet's fractured search for how to construct a spiritual world from sensual information. Seductive earthy metaphors appear within the framework of carefully wrought sonnets. She dares to use words like "soul"; it is no accident that one of her earlier books was titled Raw Heaven. Such seemingly old-fashioned language should only momentarily disarm. Peacock is a religious poet in the tradition of John Donne, a poet involved with the before and after life, describing herself as the "kind of Person who stops to look" at road kill. Always for her, seeing equals feeling. Peacock has her eyes fixed on what's around, celebrating the lovely gaiety of animals in the poem "Petting and Being a Pet," for example, which leads her to discover our own need for touch—that "touch makes being make sense."

The making sense of life through language is for Peacock the poet's job. It is not merely for their verbal felicity that people treasure certain handfuls of words. The words in Peacock's arsenal takes us by surprise as they ask and answer question of human experience that continue to haunt. No doubt this is what Robert Creeley means by delighting in Molly Peacock's genius "for saying the most necessary things."

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2002/2003 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2002/2003