cover image Cairo Traffic

Cairo Traffic

Lloyd Schwartz. University of Chicago Press, $14 (83pp) ISBN 978-0-226-74193-2

In stylized tellings of family (especially an ailing, elderly mother), ""Proverbs from Purgatory,"" ""Nostalgia (The Lake at Night)"" and other looks back, the poems of Schwartz's third collection adopt a variety of poses that can't quite defamiliarize their familiar subjects. Descriptive third-person accounts, dramatic monologues and dialogues are colloquial and direct, conveying heartfelt moments of memory and loss: ""He saved the horses.// I haven't thought about this in a thousand years.// It's like a dream: you get up it's forgotten.// Then it all comes back.// Didn't I ever tell you?// Look at me, I'm starting to cry.// What's there to cry about?// Such an old, old memory, why should it make me cry?"" Nearly all of Cairo Traffic--whether coming in terse single lines or couplets, blocks of prose, or sentence-length-determined stanzas--labors under such nostalgic melodrama, though Schwartz sometimes (as in the lines above) tries to distance himself from it through reportage. Especially disappointing pieces include a slim, contemporary redaction of the Orpheus myth, a superficially Kafka-esque dream in which a mysterious ""fat, ugly, dirty"" man toys sexually with the speaker in a cathedral, and ""Pornography,"" which offers sentimental insights and leaden double entrendres while describing jazz-age pornographic photographs: ""Not quite supine, she strains forward to eye, and/ hold, his bold erection: bat and hardballs--/ major league (his Fenway Frank; his juicy/ all-day-sucker)."" The book takes its title from the final poem, a long, meandering, mostly prose account of the poet's travels through Israel and Egypt; it also includes translations of two poems about families by Brazilian poets Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Rogerio Zola Santiago. Fans of Schwartz's Goodnight, Gracie, of his Pulitzer Prize-winning classical music commentary for the Boston Phoenix and on NPR's Fresh Air, and of his critical work on Elizabeth Bishop may find interest in these life stories; others will find little on the page to compel them. (Sept.)