Mon Canard

Author of books as diverse as a celebrated late-'60s translation of Villon (published under the pseudonym Jean Calais) and the spellbinding Four Lectures (1982), a distinctive masterpiece of Language-era writing, Rodefer has never settled into a particular method or recognized ""voice""--or, indeed, into a stable reputation. His most typical recent writing, as exhibited in small press books over the last 20 or so years, has been the quick, elegantly improvised lyric, inspired by the writing of everyone from Olson to O'Hara, Baudelaire to Stein, Verlaine to Lower East Side punk poetry, which makes this new selection of longer, more cumulative poems especially welcome. The opening short, linked prose poems of ""Daydreams of Frascati"" recall Rimbuad's Illuminations, yet simultaneously shore up history and knowledge against personal dissolution, and rail for a concept of value when the old, stable ones have vanished: ""I am come to your cartop Ajax, waxing toward an invitation to an opening in some hedgerow. Our Leninist principles have toppled, to become fabulous and Sylvan once again. We are the last metaphysical activists in American nihilism. We demand a Pope from the Bronx."" The Williams-esque three-steps of ""Erasers"" and the more acrobatic ""Arabesque at Bar"" (""ARISE/ tin lizzies/ who adore// the wooden beam/ vile bondage/ of adornoboys""), along with the projective, satiric apostrophe in ""Answer to Dr. Agathon"" and the high-flown erotic pun-machine of ""Mon Canard""--all present something of the classic, Kafkian ""description of a struggle"" rarely seen since the paranoiac overtook the agonic persona within the avant-garde. This book presents in large strokes the depths of language and, most importantly, a broad range of human feelings and interactions--from the dark to the bright, the indulgent to the ascetic--that only a poet-as-dedicated-free-radical can provide. (July)