cover image Bewitched Playground

Bewitched Playground

David Rivard. Graywolf Press, $12.95 (66pp) ISBN 978-1-55597-302-5

Wild and wildly variable in verse, Rivard (Wise Poison) aims for energy, pleasure and people getting it on. ""The facts of the next thirty minutes or years,"" he insists, ""are not like tent pegs pounded into the earth."" Often depending on the psychosexual delvings, and on the risky declarations of deep feeling which characterized American poetry in the '60s and '70s (and 20th-century Spanish poetry generally), Rivard's failures can fall flat indeed, doubly cursed by the Beats and by Sensitive Manhood: he writes of ""the meek,"" ""If I had a peaceful heart/ I would be as cruel as they are,"" and ends another poem, ""I could change her life forever."" Elegies for friends, and some of his poems about dead celebrities (""Jung""; Peruvian poet ""Vallejo and bootless Robert Johnson"") can memorialize them sensitively and well (one on Versace much less so); most of the poems on a young daughter seem just as deeply felt but less well-made. But when he takes his language more seriously, and his speaker's experience less so, Rivard becomes a terrifically unpredictable writer. ""Question for the Magic Hour"" detects ""A wind that's/ distracted, & vague,/ sniffly--/ like a rabbit, or a sedated professor."" ""I refuse to be lonely,"" a volatile lyric avers, ""I will leave like scissors from a storage case."" One of the daughter poems flits from her encounter with a ""Tsimishian mask"" to an outdoor perch on a guitar case, ending on a long view of an outdated bumper sticker. Such vivid notation on a bevy of experiences--some quite common, some bizarre to begin with--make this playground worth visiting. (Apr.)