CONFERENCE

Updating Conference of the Birds, the long poem on the search for an avian king by 12th-century Persian Sufi Farid ud-Din Attar, Doris (Paramour) dives deeply into a world infused with a supernal lightness that trembles with immanent and imminent violence, where genocidal logic and the logic of fear and of love seem to be the same: "We stumbled here from out of the blue, I suppose, and that's what's ravished. I wanted to prove that nothing is love, perhaps. Perhaps it is and perhaps I wanted to. At least like the others, I've never been able to go on. Instead, glide. And if you absolutely must give thanks for something, thank fear: fear keeps us what and how we are: mostly not looking." The many characters the poem speaks through are represented by invented glyphs; one of them, a sort of calligraphic "o," is defined as "Dad = Dad, all varieties, + all Yiddish folk songs," while "Drab," "Bird" and "Attar" himself make appearances as well. The splitting of the book's excessive digressions, plays-within-plays, songs and wise admonishments among these "characters" reads like a Babel of voices working laconically to describe the world; it's a kind of taxonomy that speaks, where each speech is elevated to the level of philosophical précis, suggesting a metaphysical schemata or key for resolution which never materializes: "Where there's no logic left, there's life, logic's opposite." Doris's modus operandi is one of constant reinvention, so that a daughter "cradling her penis," talking crows or putative transcripts from EgyptAir's doomed flight 990 (the book was completed before September 11) are not bizarre window-dressing on a conventional style, but a pathos-ridden expression of trauma, a talking through the wound of harrowing engagement with 20th-century life. Her secular mysticism, laced with a rich ironic humor and propelled by a masterly, ludic semantics, is unlike anything else in poetry today. (Feb.)