cover image Bad Judgment: Poems

Bad Judgment: Poems

Cathleen Calbert. Sarabande Books, $12.95 (72pp) ISBN 978-1-889330-24-2

The mordant, deadpan attitude of Calbert's second collection finds its appropriate subject matter in the figures that populate her poems: vampire cats and bloodsucking babies, death-warmed-over boyfriends, black-clad academics on the beach. In a dreamworld full of the living dead, Calbert's voice is the insistent, up-and-at-'em whip. These poems have an ironic mission to locate the spiritual and spirited; they blow on the ashes with provocative language and the imperative's urgency. The poet declares with confidence in ""The Last Angel Poem"": ""They are everywhere we want them to be:/ on the stems of our apples, at the garden door,/ in clogged chimneys, basement crawl spaces, our boyfriends' dirty blue jeans./ Tell the worried theologians they are/ not done for."" The speaker of ""A Lady with a Pomeranian"" sardonically finds ""Meaning!"" and ""More meaning!"" in suggestive, but ultimately banal and arbitrary events like having a bird fly in her window and finding a Queen of Hearts card in the street. Now and again Calbert cheapens her hard frankness with pop-song optimism--like at the conclusion of ""Trinity"" when the speaker falsely resolves her deep loneliness with ""and the crickets count out a beat to our lives,/ and I kiss my dog, who sleeps at my feet."" But ultimately, Calbert presides authoritatively over her own work, and her judgment is refreshingly sound. (Feb.)