Getting Ready for (or Rid of) Cupid

With its appealing heart-drawn-in-sugar cover and bite-sized format, 101 Poems That Could Save Your Life: An Anthology of Emotional First Aid may make for a point-of-sale panacea this Valentine's Day. Edited with an emphasis on British poets by London-based television producer Daisy Goodwin, this collection is introduced by NPR's Scott Simon, and categorically organized by daily travail, from "First date" and "First wrinkle" to "Staying married," "Stressed out" and "Successfully single." Poems and poets run the gamut from Wendy Cope's "How to Deal with the Press" ("She'll urge you to confide. Resist.") to Ogden Nash's "The Parent": "Children aren't happy with nothing to ignore,/ and that's what parents were created for." (HarperCollins, $15.95 160p ISBN 0-06-052913-X)

Entering the tradition begun with The 100 Best Poems of All Time and The 13 Best Horror Stories of All Time is Leslie Pockell's anthology The 100 Best Love Poems of All Time, offering measured doses of cupidity. Working with Adrienne Avila and Katharine Rapkin, Pockell takes readers from Dante's Vita Nuova to love works by Shakespeare, Marlowe and Milton and by Rabindranath Tagore, Wislawa Szymborska and Frank O'Hara through to Gregory Orr, Judith Viorst and Sandra Cisneros. (Warner, $9.95 144p ISBN 0-446-69022-8)

And when you've had enough and need to say goodbye to all that, there's Kiss Off: Poems to Set You Free, edited by Mary D. Esselman and Elizabeth Ash Vélez, who brought you The Hell with Love: Poems to Mend a Broken Heart, and whom the press chat calls "Georgetown University literature instructors, best friends, and proponents of 'literary therapy.' " They break the book into categories like "Hurting: When Things Fall Apart," "Reeling: When You Go Wild" and "Dealing: When You Face Facts," and include canonical and contemporary poems from everyone from Wang Wei to Claude McKay and Kim Konopka. By the time readers reach the "Believing: When You Stay Strong" section, they'll have absorbed a lot of poetry in the process of clearing the psychic decks. (Warner, $14.95 232p ISBN 0-446-69028-7)

Hash, Beets and a Jab for January

When HarperCollins and Ecco Press acquired part of the Black Sparrow imprint early this year, one big prize was the sprawling, long-popular oeuvre of Charles Bukowski (Barfly; Ham on Rye; Love Is a Dog from Hell). Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way: New Poems, Bukowski's 10th posthumous volume (with several more planned), collects yet more verse about the troubled, garrulous poet's traveling, gambling, thinking, aging, working, not working, romancing, drinking, self-mythologizing and even eating ("I opened a can of roastbeef hash/ and some pickled beets") as he fought through his blue-collar, beer-hall L.A. (Ecco, $27.50 416p ISBN 0-06-052735-8; Jan.)

Respected in Britain since the early 1980s, Peter Reading, after 20-odd books, has begun to find an American audience for his poems and sequences of despair and misanthropy in demanding classical meters. Reading's last offering, Marfan, described rural Texas: Faunal, his latest, sends him all over America and Australia in search of endangered or hard-to-find mammals, birds and fish, whose "spectacular/ phenomena" Reading sets against our own irresponsible species, "at once vile and intractable." Trojan War stories, myxomatosis (a grisly disease of rabbits) and epigrammatic couplets ("We can't foretell this morning/ what will befall this evening") give Reading welcome counterpoints for his laconic verse study of ecocide. (Bloodaxe [Dufour, dist.], $16.95 paper 80p ISBN 1-85224-587-5)

Rural American ecstasies, religious litanies loosely modeled on psalms, the joys and anxieties of gestation and motherhood, and erotic fulfillment all find voice in the winning, sometimes ingenuous poems of Aliki Barnstone's Wild with It. Barnstone's locales range from Greece to Manhattan to the rural Midwest, her forms from Whitmanesque free verse to a well-turned ghazal; the prolific poet, translator and anthologist (Madly in Love; Voices of Light) does best when she explores all her subjects at once, considering sex during pregnancy, for example, or offering "passion in a flame dress,/ caress of silk falling away." (Sheep Meadow [UPNE, dist.], $12.95 paper 72p ISBN 1-878818-93-7)

With his fourth book of verse, the aptly titled Jab, the Ohio-based poet-critic Mark Halliday (Selfwolf) veers skillfully between autobiographical reminiscence and bleakly comic free-associations, offering late-baby-boomer slices of life along with up-to-date self-consciousness (somewhere between James Tate and Albert Goldbarth). One moment he promises "a poem so rich it made normal living look like sawdust"; the next he's "telling stories about our absent-minded teachers/ who forgot damn near everything except what they really loved." (Univ. of Chicago, $14 paper 107p ISBN 0-226-31386-7)

Long admired as the editor of TriQuarterly, novelist and translator Reginald Gibbons (Sparrow: New and Selected Poems) returns with his seventh book of poems, It's Time. Gibbons offers impressive range and ambition in works "sometimes small but as/ Weighty as the world." Several risky poems of metaphysical and moral statement may please admirers of the late Robert Penn Warren. Other standouts include an appalled, compressed narrative "Poem Including History"; a prose-poem sequence on ancient birds and modern political protests; a fragmentary dramatic monologue, "Stop" ("Remember the time you hid under my bed and you said" constitutes one abandoned reverie); and a pleasingly retrograde, Yeatsian stanzaic poem about swans. (Louisiana State Univ., $22.95 72p ISBN 0-8071-2814-7; $15.95 paper -2815-5)

January First Book Blowout

Born in Saigon, raised in Washington, D.C., and now living in Austin, Tex., Hoa Nguyen tongue-in-cheekily channels Your Ancient See Through, making time and space "numb where the knowledge knife is gifted/ and owl nimble-necked blinks at me." Nguyen, half of Skanky Possum magazine's editorial team and its related press, offers nearly 80 short poems in six sections (matched with line drawings by Philip Trusell) that refuse to accept experience as currently processed for consumption, and apply a steely whimsicality to its refiguration: "Bring specific flowers I will not know the names of/ Slowly pump your arms as you walk by." The results are immediate and unique: "the center is/ light green... the tender part/ is the newest part." (Subpress [SPD, dist.], $12 paper 120p ISBN 1-930068-13-1)

"Missile silos implode in North Dakota/ copping the absence/ as I shrunk back in horror at the use I was making of my intelligence..." writes Drew Gardner in "Black Atlantic Sky," one of 12 perfectly calibrated, mostly monostichic poems in Sugar Pill. The editor of Snare magazine and a percussionist who has collaborated frequently with other poets, Gardner is concerned with keeping time of all sorts here: "Homeostasis" finds "body systems regulated within normal bounds/ tethered seven shrimp to a platform"; "The Manufacturers" know that "each muscle fiber can support 1000x its own weight/ set up to maintain systems of feeling/ whether we are included with our descendants" or not; the title panacea charts "footprints of darkening work/ we cannot fall out of." Readers will not want to fall out of this one. (Krupskaya [SPD, dist.], $11 paper 72p ISBN 1-928650-14-7)

If "our dear librarian is a devious machine" then "by force of needle not need but able/ do i explain myself," in Jen Hofer's debut Slide Rule. Hofer, who has edited an anthology of poetry by Mexican women due next year from the University of Pittsburgh, splits her time between Los Angeles and Mexico City, which may explain how parts of this "vivacious mismatch enclave missive" came to be. Divided into five parts, including two titled "The Denotative Sky" and one titled "Holocaust" ("There is an art museum./ There is a water pipe./ There is no weathervane."), the book takes readers on a lexically intensive tour of "strategies to make the skeletal stick still." (Subpress, $10 paper 96p ISBN 1-930068-15-8)

Matthew Zapruder, editor-in-chief at Verse Press, makes his own verse debut with American Linden, sure to receive cognoscenti attention, especially in Verse's home bases (New England and New York). Zapruder's hip lyricism offers both the slippery comedy and a surprisingly grave, ultimately winning, commitment to real people, emotions, locales: "My lack of compassion astounds me," Zapruder explains, "and must not come to know itself"; another poem ends as the poet himself is admonished, " 'Come back when you have something/ less riveting to say.'" (Tupelo [www.tupelopress.org], $14.95 paper 88p ISBN 0-9710310-9-6)

A spousal relationship is reflected in a poetic codex: The Effacements by Chris McCreary is bound with Jenn McCreary's A Doctrine of Signatures in an entirely equitable arrangement, as each poet gets 55 pages. Jenn's "bile" "was thick, black nourishment feculent/ was partial & purged/ from the spleen one where melancholy/ & dried cool & sourblack/ & is a bridle to two, preserves/ them in blood/ & feeds bone." Chris's "Fizz licked from chapped lips/ while pitching down a staggered path/ of scratched glasses, smashed bone,/ broken phones" is "wishing to shift this itch,/ inching imperceptibly toward this exit"—and finishes with "21 Suggested Readings." Readers will accept the assignment only after finishing these two. (Singing Horse [SPD, dist.], $12.50 paper 112p ISBN 0-935162-24-0)

Apparently the first book of poems in English by (or about) a Tibetan-American, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa's Rules of the House is set in Tibet and in the South Asian exile communities where Dhompa spent her youth. Her interconnected, memory-drenched poems (many in short prose paragraphs) move easily between particular Tibetan losses and a gnomic lyric mode that welcomes all comers: monastery kitchens sit beside funerals and love affairs, epigrams promise "wording eyes," and one page concludes "Give eyes to your feet. Don't follow." (Apogee [SPD, dist.], $12.95 paper 96p ISBN 0-9669937-9-9)

Don Share's earnest, moving first volume, Union, represents the promising next stage in so-called Southern narrative poetry. Share writes clear, well-crafted page-long poems about romance, memory and separation ("our house tocks and ticks/ like an inherited clock whose hour hand sticks"). He may, however, achieve greater recognition for longer work (like "Pax Americana") in which his own stories join those of Memphis, Tennessee and of the Civil War's difficult, lingering guilt: "Where the United States ends/ and begins// The Mississippi is/ a long American wound." Fans of Rodney Jones, say, should read Share posthaste. (Zoo, $14.95 paper 64p ISBN 0-9708177-7-0)

Beautifully bound in mock 1950s wood veneer, Jeff Hull's Spoor selects from among three larger projects, collects a few stray pieces, presents the long title poem: "pastoral fearlessness reduced to gleaming object." A section of "1995—1996 Ear Inn Introductions" uses real readers from that legendary New York series (here with names blocked out) as pretexts for staccato torrents of charged poetico-politics: "If experimentation implies a suitable existent environ and capitulation to capital can be as simple as getting turned on by a person in riot gear, then the fragility of necessity effectively devalues 'good intention.' " Where can one go from there?—"the world before dawn where men drive with their coffee." (Subpress, $11 paper 80p ISBN 1-930068-02-6)

Arielle Greenberg's debut Given promises, and delivers, up-to-date, intellectually challenging comic verse, a nose and a half ahead of most of her peers: her best work remains both slippery and sharp, like ice skates in use. Greenberg's most attractive, most clearly American pieces incorporate, and answer, the styles and signatures of poets like Dean Young and Mark Levine, telling the "International Herald Tribune," for example, "Your newspaper is a two-star hotel"; her aggressively contemporary figures evoke worlds her readers know well: "All the soft serve flurry metaphors intended, right." (Verse [www.BigSmallPressMall.com], $12 paper 88p ISBN 0-9723487-1-9)

Of the 29 poems Michael Ruby has composed for At an Intersection, it may be the "Overexposed Faces" that endure the longest: "A face behind a comb's teeth/ A face splashed with blue dye/ A face behind bars." Ruby, who works at the copy desk of the Wall Street Journal, completed an MFA at Brown in the early '80s, letting this debut come together as poems crossed his path: "Now that they're so near,/ in one of the cubbyholes at/ my post office branch,/ I should be celebrating." His book is the seventh title for Alef Books, which won support from the Academy of American Poets' Eric Mathieu King fund. (Alef [SPD, dist.], $15 paper 48p ISBN 1-882509-06-4)