November Collections

Spanning 35 years, Gorgeous Chaos: New and Selected Poems 1965—2001 brings together work from Jack Marshall's seven previous volumes (including Marshall's three most recent titles also available from Coffee House) along with over a dozen new pieces. Throughout his career, Marshall's work has remained thematically consistent as he meditates on the collision between mystical yearnings and the commonplace, often harsh realities of life. (Even Marshall's Arabic Jewish background embodies the potential for culture clash.) Recent pieces such as "Re-entry" observe that while transcendence may not ultimately be possible, the experience of living is enough, and Marshall "wouldn't change a thing" as he looks back. The spare yet powerful "Glimmer," propels the reader forward through a dizzying yet measured synthesis of body, mind and spirit. The voice of Marshall's recent work is especially musical and sure, ending this volume on a note that should please both long-time devotees and new fans alike. (Coffee House, $16 paper 300p ISBN 1-56689-130-2)

A much-lauded late-bloomer, B.H. Fairchild imbues his amiable formal verse with Hollywood-caliber style, sentiment and (mainly) good cheer in Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest. Following the runaway success of his 1997 Alice James book, The Art of the Lathe, this third collection probes deeper into the bleak beauty of the Midwest in the 1950s, and fans of Fairchild's comforting excursions to the familiar isolated territory of machinists won't be disappointed. If the poet's younger self found "Dvorak's New World... made me/ swallow hard and turn my face away because, well,/ it was beautiful, a word I wasn't easy with," these memory systems yield a sharp-eyed and excited collection of curiosities that work in and beyond the heartland. (Norton, $22.95 128p ISBN 0-393-05096-3)

First Book Fall Blow-out

Life on several continents, sexual passion and intellective experience among the recesses of language produce the unique prose poems in Donna Stonecipher's The Reservoir. Residence in Teheran, Prague, Seattle and Iowa—and study of prose-poem masters from St. John Perse to Killarney Clary—inform the inviting reflections and meditations in Stonecipher's volume, in which "Words drift free of their captors," the beach-side "sun proves that I am hollow" and "The record kept spinning as if to please the needle. So we all hoped for something private to excavate our own engraved refrains." (Univ. of Georgia, $16.95 paper 88p ISBN 0-8203-2463-9; Nov.)

Formal agility plays a fast game of tag with modern urban women's issues in The Search Engine, the slippery and absolutely contemporary debut from Kathleen Ossip, which slips non sequiturs and famous names (from Woody Allen to the Waldorf) into its sonnets, syllabics, macaronics, and other high-spirited accomplishments, including a Provençal ballade about Plath and Sexton. Picked for the APR prize by Derek Walcott (who confesses both awe and bafflement in his introduction), Ossip's sometimes bitter comedy might please readers of otherwise quite varied tastes. In exuberant, sometimes cynical sequences, "the angel of the/ suburbs sells indelible stuff" and "a guy with soulful brown/ peepers hires a pert gal who wavers." (American Poetry Review [Consortium, dist.], $23 80p ISBN 0-9718981-0-3; $14 paper -1-1; Oct.)

This year's Yale Younger Poet is a young man with a record collection. In Sean Singer's Discography, aggressively up-to-date techniques (some of which suggest Mark Levine or Dean Young) evoke and analyze Afro-American music from early blues recordings ("My hair is black and glossy but I am not Bessie Smith") to John Coltrane. In Singer's two-part ode to a piano, "Eternity begins with springs, hammers & felt." Other sides of this thematically varied collection examine a character named, punningly, "Singer," or take up the poet's own sentiments (including guilt) about his Jewish identity: one highlight (singled out by judge W. S. Merwin) is a "Poem with Groucho Marx Refrains." (Yale Univ., $25 88p ISBN 0-300-09362-4; $12.95 paper -09363-2; Oct.)

"He wonders if they were lovers. Did the lovers burn?" These and other questions about gay men in America just before and during the age of AIDS animate the passionately descriptive and often elegiac poems of David Groff's Theory of Devolution, selected for this year's National Poetry Series by Mark Doty. Doty's own admirers will surely warm to Groff's accomplishments, which include evocations of Manhattan, Fire Island and rural America; high-powered recollections of the party circuit; well-placed activist slogans; and movingly personal, erotic memorials to an "always-dying particular man." Groff helped found the Publishing Triangle, an association of book-business lesbians and gay men. (Univ. of Illinois, $30 88p ISBN 0-252-02779-5; $15.95 paper -07086-0; Oct.)

Lesbian, gay and queer life in Provincetown, Mass., and family life all over America find an ebullient and very believable voice in the long-lined, often memoiristic, poems of Melanie Braverman's Red. "Gay" begins, disarmingly and charmingly, "Is this why I like girls?" Other poems use beach, ocean, whales and sand dunes as spiritual symbols, while "What I Want" (one of several poems to chronicle a P-town scene) features Pauline who "used to sleep/ with girls, but last year some guy on an island did her and now/ she's on the bocce court with a daughter.../ I have a waitress dress I wear for kicks when I go out." (Perugia. [SPD, Baker & Taylor, dist.], $12 paper 72p ISBN 0-9660459-5-5; Oct.)

Out of Iowa come two ambitious first books that combine collage, Continental philosophy and disjunction with unusually strong commitments to particular subjects. Robyn Schiff's Worth spins hyperarticulate verbal patterns and tragic (or melodramatically hinted-at) plots around the arts of jewelry, parfumerie, and fashion design. Schiff (who holds an MFA from Iowa and a degree in medieval studies) gives her poems titles like "House of Dior," "House of De Beers," "Chanel no. 5" —except for seven poems named after finches. In long quotations and glimmering descriptive phrases reminiscent at times of Cole Swensen, at other times of Lucie Brock-Broido, Schiff creates with disturbing ease a high-stakes, often hyper-aestheticized world of royalty, glass cases, and tormented souls: "Dear Tapestry-Master,/ Where does the Devil Finch nest in your design?/ Dearly Appointed Chef,/ I am dissatisfied." (Univ. of Iowa, $16 paper 88p ISBN 0-87745-820-0; Oct.)

Recent Iowa MFA Katie Ford (who also holds a Harvard M.A. in Divinity) explores an altogether grittier, more disturbing register of American violence and Christian belief in her first collection, Deposition. Though some poems (especially near the end of the book) show too clear a debt to Jorie Graham, much of Ford's work anatomizes her very own, and very striking, fascination with first things, last things and the problem of evil. Especially compelling are several long-lined poems entitled "Last Breath": in one of those, "They blindfolded her put her in the closet for a month/ they didn't want her dead grass pulled out they wanted her to believe." (Graywolf, $14 paper 88p ISBN 1-55597-374-4; Oct.)

Gertrude Stein's traditions of grammatical and cognitive experimentation are alive and well in Sarah Anne Cox's Arrival, whose eight sequences disarrange and rearrange the categories of thought. The first (and perhaps most fun) should delight armchair linguists, being both an exploration of pronouns and verb moods and a love story gone wrong: "When I said he was an indirect statement it was about my relationship to the him." Cox's later, more challenging sequences break lines and sentences up into much smaller bits, investigating chronology, international politics, memory and forgetting: "those who are afraid of gunfire will/ not remove the body." (Krupskaya [SPD, dist.], $11 paper 64p ISBN 1-928650-12-0; Oct.)