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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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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Merrill Gilfillan
Adventures in Poetry/Zephyr Press ($12.50)

by Dale Smith

November 5: The Seasons arrives with the first cold blast of fall air. The poems extend song with objectivist clarity, relating attention impressed by the physical world. They are lovely, light on the surface, but packed beneath with minute particulars of place, memory and art, resembling layered deposits of compost. "1958," the poet's 13th year, is a poem of recollection. The notational compiling of images conjures the sensual condition of a child's geographic placement in time, but without any nostalgic intrusions.

Found a frog.
Went to dancing lessons.
Read books I got
for Christmas.

Sledding on
Jackson's hill. Woodcock
for dinner. Listened
to radio. Played

on pond. Went
to a dance. Skating
at Uncle D's. Making
a whistle. Played

"Count and Capture."
Learning Morse code.
Ice thawing. Mended
fletching on arrows.

This is an "I remember" poem, but the leading verb of each sentence activates the energy of the line. There's no bog in rhetoric. Instead, the mimetic simplicity of childhood is attained by the reduction to action and image.

No proposals. The focus is domestic, personal. There is sensuous delight in language and landscape. Observe the clarity of image, the quick movement from natural detail to human relation in this fragment from "Five Landscapes":

Teal flush
across inkblue water,
over Charolais bulls.
Let the young remember
the old, the old
forget the young,
the dead the living.

The levity and casual command of Gilfillan's poems work out of an attention to the complexity of environment. Not environment in the Green Peace sense, but ones that relate the morphology of personal space. The precise choice of his words also shows an inward poetic ecology where language moves from material utterance toward emotional values. With few words to waste, he strives for a quality of art that registers feeling in the syllabic restraint of his lines. Language is the mediating force between him and his natural, or noetic, environments.

Writing, as he practices it, seeks proper relations. In the first movement of "Systole Variations," he writes:

The straits of July.

A strange moth in the keyhole.

The summer deep
as of piles or hills
of leaves or snow.

Bring it over
through the solid month
that mouse-colored horse
you wish to sell.

We aren't beat on the head with social causes, though what constitutes proper relations are subtly given here. There's an easy appreciation of the cycle of return and dissolution. "What a face / on that barred owl / dead beside the road—" he writes in "A Nap by the Kickapoo." Life. Death. Rhythm. Etc. But the art of it—making oneself capable—that's the trick, or the acceptance.

The long, final sequence, "The Seasons," appropriately ends this fine book. Jaggedly moving, these quick takes morph into revelation. They set into the play of words the patterns of weather, plants, labor and memory. Poetry here is derived from mundane—certainly rural, not urban—sources. Lists reveal a rhythm for each season, a sense of the poet's preoccupations. In "Summer," for instance, we read:

June 21 to July 6:
Weed rice.
Plant mulberries
to sprout new saplings.
Plant hemp.
Plant late red hibiscus.

Come winter, the focus shifts:

January 6 to January 20:
Pick mulberry leaves. Chill
silkworm eggs. Catch snow-water.

It's as if one's post-its or calendar entries could be transformed to the level of art. Which of course they can, and are, here. The so-called subject of a poem, Gilfillan shows us, can be anything. It's the ability of the poet to see from within that finds energy in the routines of every day. The poet practices art in order to see and hear, to find in his imagination what forms speak to him. The word to stress is practice. How to see or how to listen in a poem is the point. His poems aren't pumped full of attitude or irony. There aren't any social proposals. There is instead an almost moral emphasis—expressed directly through the work—on the responsibilities to domestic space, one's own language and patient listening.

Summer coffee
sweet in the slot
between crickets
and cicadas.

... ...

Such
such catbird
sings

we set
our dark blue
pencil down.

His is an objectivist, occult preoccupation, finding relations in things. William Carlos Williams had the "no ideas but in things" wrap down long ago. But the environment of things here in the all-inclusive seasons relies also on prosody, careful timing, the physical rhythm and resilience of his pacing.

We climbed the hill
(a mountain-hill, Big Sur)
with bedrolls and a bag
of avocados and slept
up there one night.

The "up" in the final line lets this stanza swing in the vernacular of Gilfillan's Ohio-bred voice. Resilience of voice and heart, the quick grasp of mind for the particulars of environment-these qualities, among many, make rich his seemingly casual surfaces. The difficulty of this achievement is immense, and seldom praised. But the point of such life-long labor in art slips into his Seasons with sudden, eye-opening clarity: "To seek that which was lost / without knowing seeking / or that it was ever gone.

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

Erín Moure
Anansi Press ($12.95)
by Laura Mullen

The system of beauty—our little gamine—is about to crash. —from "Georgette"

The Canadian poet Erín Moure's new book is so brave, has so much truly lively wit, and is so completely fresh it makes a lot of contemporary American poetry look like dorm furniture from Target: instantly charming and easy to discard. But...seriously. In her twelfth book, Moure sets a wise and politically well-informed playfulness to the very serious task of opening spaces to speak from, to be human in, and from which to recognize the humanity of others. Seriously, Moure—as she notes of Clarice Lispector—"does not construct her reader as a receptacle of authorial direct speech but engages readers in the word's enactment / folding" and the effort to "speak in the difficult tongue." Seriously, starting with its title (which begins the work of finding out the complicated site of a feminine "citizen"), the book is on a headlong, headstrong, career: intersecting language at angles that widen its freedoms and set in motion new possibilities.

Rapture as rupture, O Cidadán is a polyphonic echo chamber in which desire(s) for truth make crucial an intertextual and necessarily on-going effort extended over time. Starting where love 'bursts' a failure to hear, the book proceeds by that careful and wild—that conscious and ecstatic—emphasis on sensation, understanding, and memory which is so characteristic of Moure's writing. Inside and outside are, as always, at issue—but the poet has never pressed so hard at the limits of language and world for the fullest communication. Images, diagrams and disappearing fonts, screen or screamplays, strike-outs, and re(re)iterations are all put to the arduous/ardorous task of arriving at a knowledge which is subject to an ethical accountability and open to revision. "A kind of movement, then, lisp-ecto-real. // Which beckons the whole notion of 'outside' into the field of inquiry and unseats it." Here an ongoing process produces deep pages: layers of thinking and thinking again make for a radically dialogic text in which the author's words and the thoughts of other writers are in conversation and community. Here poetry becomes a place wide as the world, where anything can happen and everything is passionately considered. Here, where the relation of word to word and human to human is challenged, an open self finds out its otherness:

To persist
somatic coalesce does imbue a fetter
wherein "I am" reiteration's frank motel

which is a fold or distal not proximal
carina vaginae whose "the shudder" lies

that thing drawn 'cross us like
a scar or want         is "us"

falls homily             to iterate is to endure
"us" only visible as the frame delects

a change or mitt in these "conditions"
is my homily

Possible's believer         conjures belief
field guns or gone (could not read over her shoulder)

behold-en

election obéissance crowd assault

As she goes "beyond measure," slipping past or shattering the borders of forms, names, languages, national boundaries, and genres, Moure brings to and from her wide travels an exemplary presence, challenging our understanding of difference and putting all totalities in question. In the very serious play of the poet our doubts become us, our silences speak, and hesitation becomes eloquent, as we attempt to echolocate identities and a citizenship outside the destroyed horizon of nation or country, aiming at discovering our largest human rights.

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

Susan M. Shultz
Potes & Poets Press ($12.95)

by Hank Lazer

It is just as easy to exaggerate or caricature the do's and don'ts of innovative poetry as it is to satirize the "show don't tell" and "find your own voice" premises of more mainstream poetry. If much innovative poetry, particularly Language poetry and its blurry aftermath, involves a swerving away from personally expressive writing and the voicing of personal lyrical epiphanies, one might begin, quite profitably, to study recent innovative poetry that quite clearly no longer pays such rigid attention to such dutiful avoidances. In fact, one could argue that much of the most interesting poetry today stems from the tension of how to situate the personal and the autobiographical within a writing practice nonetheless committed to the heuristics of new forms.

Beginning with Lyn Hejinian's My Life (1980), what Ron Silliman has called "the new sentence" has proven to be a particularly malleable and engaging form within which to explore new expressions and contextualizations of the personal and autobiographical. Susan Schultz's Memory Cards & Adoption Papers arrives as an important new example of a superbly engaging exploration at the intersection of sentence-based poetry and the writing of (among other things) personal history.

In this book beautifully designed by Gaye Chan, the cards of memory can be shuffled and dealt in many ways. Memory Cards is deliberately not presented chronologically, though the cards do get sorted somewhat by category: Mother, Places, Ruptures, Words, Losses, and Epitaphs. In the first Mother-card, Schultz writes, "Misunderstanding becomes our pas de deux, both a step and a negation." The cards—Schultz's pages and paragraphs, her arranging of the sentences—are not exactly a setting things right, but a setting in context. That, in fact, may be the wonder and the appeal of "new sentence" compositions: the democracy of the sentence (each sentence an equal citizen of the text); a rich new realism, a new writing of culture and history, made possible through juxtaposition unconcerned with continuity, the extensions of an argument, nor illustrations of a point. Schultz's sentence (quoted above) links to the following four sentences: "Pas du tout. Oom pa pa. Meter to our mother-daughter-epic. The buttons were there to be pushed, and we the sensitive software." The multi-faceted paths of sound, of pun, of pronouncement become ways of assembling complex but non-totalizing perspectives.

Schultz acknowledges, "Poetry comes of memory, though in the wrong hands..." And even though the poetry of memory—the personal anecdotal poetry so common today—is (and has been) in such disrepute among writers valuing new forms and rhetorics for poetry, Schultz has the courage not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and the commitment to explore new ways of writing personal and familial memory. In fact, she writes a book very much about the politics, culture, and emotions of babies—of families and expectations, of mothers and mothering, of trying to get pregnant, of miscarrying, and of adopting. But her stories are not the neatly contained epiphanies of most contemporary "personal" poetry. Instead, they are held within a much richer, more multi-faceted text of families, violence, wars, abuse, and the collision of cultures, especially of east and west. What's at stake in Schultz's book is nothing less audacious than how to see, think, and feel—to see the world and one's "own" life, and what to say about it. To make sense of it, but not too much nor too glib a form of sense. Or, as one page has it, the task of happiness might begin in the "grip" that sentences might acquire: "The happiness project depends on clarity, for clarity is a kind of happiness, a kind in clarity, in happiness, and to know this is to aim for sentences sure of their terrain..." Though she writes—

I have earned my clarity, as my happiness, through process of reduction, restriction of wandering through concentration on this one, this image I have of my mother in North Africa drinking spiked wine and dancing naked in the moonlight. She who has not yet come upon her happiness waits it out in the opacities of autumn, seven years past my father's death, the leaves a bright orange and yellow that November, his clarity, a gift that can only be called happiness.

Schultz's writing aims for a clarity that does not come from singleness of purpose nor from a single, focused image. The clarity she seeks is that of personal history suspended and placed in the complexity of historical and cultural circumstance—a sentencing that makes clarity at best a momentary (and rapidly disappearing) experience.

Memory Cards is a widely ranging book—nomadic in both the range of its attention and geographically as seen in the author's travels (as well as in her home, Oahu, as the site of travelers). It is a poetry restlessly observing, changing directions, and questioning its own utility and value: "There are outlets that are not malls. Though the price of our being falls like the Dow. We cannot confiscate hatred or put it in a pen, or erase its inscriptions. But recognition alters, like photons when they're measured, like scenes their plays. Play off this transposition. If the key fits, use it." Schultz's poetry attends to the altering and altered recognition, to the precise measurings of change, the knowing as a kind of wobbling step: "Rhythm, not rhyme, tempo, not time. I placed a dime in Tennessee and it accrued value until it became a Honda plant. While her mother, schizophrenic, dies by degrees. For this is loss by attrition. Where the self was, now there is another. Some acquire the habit of being themselves. Others learn to play at consistency, like Groucho. We all step on cobblestones from time to time."

The book's concluding section, Adoption Papers, begins with surreal collisions, juxtapositions, substitutions, and violence that is both the world from which and into which Sangha is adopted:

I kicked her in the stomach, but I didn't use force. The victim's mother married her rapist before sentencing, attends weekly prayer services for him. He was a good biology teacher: I'd put my daughter in his classroom even now. At Angkor Wat, a boy sniffs glue because I want to forget, sells his body for more. On the News Hour website, a transcription replaces Angkor with encore. Repetition is history's force: misheard history an anarchy of substitutions. Encore for Angkor, Watts for Wat, farce for force; anger's elegies abandoned like the killing fields. The man who played Dith Pran was murdered for his watch in California.

Through this killing field of substitution, amnesia, and force, Adoption Papers moves through the bureaucratic horrors and emotional twists and turns of the adoption process as Schultz and her husband Bryant adopt Sangha, a Cambodian baby.

Out of this world emerges a poetics and ethics of seeing and being:

To know when denial helps and when it corrodes. To embrace privation without wishing for its good health. To toast its marriage to history and know they will not dissolve, one into the other, like the surf's wash into sand, even when dusk enforces mergers. To incorporate without creating an empire; to take an empire down without destroying ours. To create an ultrazone of fun within whatever ruins encroach on us. To make a practice of watching different worlds exhumed and then revised at the point of a laser. To make evident what cannot yet be said, that peace in our time is impossible, that justice is a stick without a carrot. To pray for a cobbled treaty between us and the outside.

It is an ethics that demands a facility for juxtaposition—perhaps a historicized and culturally acute form of negative capability? Conditions that might require a writer to conclude, "I write in prose because I'm a lyric poet."

Shultz's book—and her extraordinary work as editor of Tinfish magazine and Tinfish Press—provides ample evidence that the new—the significantly new, or the cooking up of significant fusions—will come from independent outposts, from unlikely places that will temper one in a requisite independence and industry.

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