Just Let Me Say This about That: A Narrative Poem

After a heyday in the 18th century, a spectacular series of Romantic and Victorian contortions and a brief revival in the hands of W.H. Auden, the philosophical essay-in-verse has died in our century and left only its ghost to haunt the lyric. In this brilliant long poem, Bricuth (aka Johns Hopkins critic John Irwin) has more fun with the cadaver than is seemly or moral, adapting a late-middle-aged, Midwestern, Jehovah-like persona (named ""Sir"") who uses the pretext of a press conference with three reporters (""Bird,"" ""Fox"" and ""Fish"") to sound off, in a fine parody of Frost at his cheesiest, on the State of the Universe at century's end. Taking up one after another the received consolations of the age in response to the animals' Big Questions (What is truth? What is the good life? ""`Ah, Sir, did you have to kill the children?'"" etc.), the crass, sadistic Sir quashes each glimmer of rational hope, to his own delight and their despair. It's ""The Mr. Bill Show"" in blank verse tercets, ""On the Vanity of Human Wishes"" updated by Richard Rorty on a bad trip and Browning's Setebos come to life, full of learned references and mock-instructive fables in the Augustan manner. Which is to say, Bricuth's poem is very funny; it's also surprisingly, embarrassingly sad, a convincing account of the pain we pretend is wisdom. (Sept.) FYI: Just Let Me Say This About That is the first volume in Overlook's Sewanee Writers' Series.