Poetry
-- Publishers Weekly, 3/19/2007
Boxed and starred reviews indicate books of outstanding quality. Boxed, unstarred reviews indicate books of special interest. The Ship of Birth Despite his long residence in Vermont, Delanty remains an Irish poet at heart; his compact, entertaining seventh collection, much of it built around the birth of his son, Daniel, draws on some of the virtues and mannerisms of Delanty's compatriot Paul Muldoon. Effusive, distractable, given to wit and to sonic patterns just this side of ostentation, Delanty's stanzas celebrate conception, gestation and early childhood without taking themselves overseriously: an opening poem hails "Our sprout// who art there inside the spacecraft/ of your Ma." The delivery itself gives rise to a profusion of consonant wordplay, since the poet envisions it as "A Circus": "juggling doctors; funambulist nurses;/ and all the farraginous farrago of this Earth." Soon after Daniel is born, Delanty's mother dies; her diagnosis, chemotherapy and expected demise provide a counterpoint to the birth, and Delanty (The Blind Stitch) treats her death with relative reserve. Rapid free verse that at times approximates couplets, stanzas packed with off-rhymes, and attractively constructed sonnets make clear his technical prowess, while quotable endings should bring a tremble of recognition to readers who know the scenes described; at the end of "The Fetal Monitor Day," the son in the womb has "gone quiet as a dormouse,/ about to bring down your own house." (Mar.) The Broken String Schulman's sixth outing goes all-out in attempting to represent joy: the kind that comes from works of art, in classical music, in jazz or on canvas, and the kind that comes from attention to everyday details. In the opening title poem, in which the violinist Itzhak Perlman advises (in Schulman's paraphrase): "make music with all you have, and find/ a newer music with what you have left." Other artists, other moments, provoke less optimistic thoughts: Masaccio's Adam and Eve, like Schulman with her former friend or lover, expresses "the long vibrato/ of sacred rage"; the painter Chaim Soutine, known for depicting carcasses, finds "light/ and the heart of dread." Schulman (Days of Wonder) sounds most convincing when her palette grows darker: "Death" belies its stark title by presenting, in dense five-line stanzas, many cultures' ceremonies of mourning, from the Jewish "Kaddish that sanctifies and praises being" to a New Orleans brass-band funeral. Here, even more than in prior collections, Schulman seeks and finds a fluency in traditional forms: trimeter quatrains here and there, but by and large a supple, unforced pentameter, whether rhymed, off-rhymed or blank. Detractors may find the new work offers few surprises; admirers may find much to praise. (Mar.) Space Walk Sleigh (The Far Side of the Earth) has slowly, and justly, won a reputation for his clean-lined, sinewy poems about tough men, wounded bodies and all the forms of strength—intellectual, moral, aural, physical, emotional. His seventh book of verse is not his most striking, but may be his saddest and most humane. Stanzas about Homeric violence, and about its modern counterparts, frame understated, nearly tearful depictions of troubled lovers (gay and straight), grieving survivors and the last days of the poet's father, "moving with the clumsy gestures/ Of a man in a space suit—the strangeness of death/ Moving among the living." A Gerhardt Richter painting conjures reincarnations of Hercules, compelled by mean gods to "the fate he must fulfill, slaughtering/ with his club whatever comes into his way"; drag shows suggest obituaries; radio broadcasts look forward to the Earth's end; and the Middle East, ancient and modern, echoes with emblems of oblivion: "We will be covered by the dune,/ and uncovered in time." Body and mind, for Sleigh, must die together, and their mutual sadness, incomprehension and struggle generates each poem. This serious focus, the well-managed ancient Greek analogues and the wrung-out credibility of the best stanzas belong to nobody but Sleigh. (Mar.)
Greg Delanty. Louisiana State Univ., $45 (64p) ISBN 978-0-8071-3218-0; $16.95 paper ISBN 978-0-8071-3219-7
Grace Schulman. Houghton Mifflin, $22 (96p) ISBN 978-0-618-44370-3
Tom Sleigh. Houghton Mifflin, $22 (96p) ISBN 978-0-618-68424-3
