The Paradise of Forms: Selected Poems

At this point, the principal legacy of 1960s ""free verse"" may be a myopic identification of formalism with conservatism-as though constraint were indistinguishable from repression. Shurin's The Paradise of Forms proves just the opposite; it delightfully explores a m lange of containers, frames, and matrices through which a poem can come to life. That these forms here take shape paradoxically--through breakage, shock, glissement--makes them no less ""prosodic"" or constructive. From the disjunctive lyric of Shurin's ""Parallel Views"" (The Graces, 1983), the work grows increasingly tactical, refracted and serial, advancing from interior depths to syntactic horizons: ""Wasp of benevolent diction in contention with cars, a narrow pole deep into the North dug with cautious abandon."" By ""Codex,"" typographical dissonance directs the poem back into the surface of the page: ""Agog before the remainder a choked overture, HE TRIES TO PULL THE SKIN FROM ITS INCISIVE GRASP, `he fumbled and gaped.' "" Later work, such as Into Distances (1993), clusters prose paragraphs into arch parables or demi-essays, after which (in ""Involuntary Lyrics"") Shurin returns to verse. Pattern, recombination, and a kind of lovely noise--like teletype from the collective unconscious--mark the musical structures of these books of forms. (Mar.)