cover image Psalms: Poems

Psalms: Poems

April Bernard. W. W. Norton & Company, $17.95 (62pp) ISBN 978-0-393-03569-8

In her second collection of poetry, Bernard ( Bye Bye Blackbird ) takes the psalm as a point of departure and arrival, mingling a contemporary ``scramble of idioms'' with spiritual searching in more than 30 poems. The poetry is about rhythm, partly: the jazzy, worldly rhythms that surround us and can obstruct or buoy. It's also about listening: Bernard's ear has absorbed the calls and answers of previous meditative writings and writers before taking leave of them and claiming us as an audience. Her own voice adds to that gathering, offering lamentation, cynicism, restlessness, hope and a pictorial intelligence especially alert to urban subjects. And part of the pleasure of reading is the surprises she deals out, from word to word or line to line. In ``Praise Psalm of the City-Dweller,'' Bernard writes of ``yellow sedans'' that ``herd like goats''; in ``Psalm of Withdrawal'' and elsewhere, she knits high and low vision and diction skillfully into one fabric. In ``Psalm of the Explanation Dwellers,'' she considers the battle of the sexes, without simplifying. There's a quality of bolting in the book's most energetic work that suggests a satisfying assertion of the human over the divine. (Dec.)