cover image Gospel Night

Gospel Night

Michael Waters. BOA (Consortium, dist.), $16 trade paper (80p) ISBN 978-1-934414-53-8

Serious passions, homages and memories, scenes described with anger or affection, crop up throughout this 10th volume from the New Jersey–based Waters (Darling Vulgarity), whose string of honors stretches back to the 1970s. Waters excels at stark-eyed, honest elegies—for an influential teacher who killed himself; for Johnny Cash; and for the poet’s own father—all rendered in the strong free verse that is Waters’s signature. Travel poems visit Costa Rica, Malta, and where Waters’s wife grew up, Romania. The austerity of her childhood informs the heartbreaking “Beloved,” where Mihaela, in her teens, reads Ethan Frome. She reappears in his poems of erotic love, which at their best move outward from the human body to the natural world, “To bluebells, foxglove, tawny daylilies—/ Ink-dry ampoule, spongy stylus, blunt nib/ That waxed ecstatic for the Beloved!” Waters finds self-confidence in such scenes, such symbols; there are also “swollen, blackened, almost/ Otherworldly cherries./ Their bleached pits will light our path.” He is a poet of detail, but also one of directness, pursuing strong feeling wherever it dives or climbs. (Oct.)