cover image The World at Large: New and Selected Poems, 1971-1996

The World at Large: New and Selected Poems, 1971-1996

James McMichael. University of Chicago Press, $27.5 (218pp) ISBN 978-0-226-56105-9

In this mix of three new poems plus work from four previous books, McMichael, for better and worse, proves himself an intense and gifted renderer of detail. ""The Vegetables,"" from 1971, are stuffed with creepy personifications--an asparagus with ""his crowns already tender, his spine giving in."" The graceful and effective long poem ""Each in a Place Apart"" breathes freshness into the familiar crisis of a writer's entanglement with a younger woman, an ensuing divorce and years of doubt and lust. Internal monologues and small, captured moments instill honesty: ""There's time for movies, now, and double solitaire. We wrestle."" But in a case of overkill, the book's centerpiece, a nearly 2000-line morass titled ""Four Good Things,"" attempts to expound on the death, from cancer, of the poet's mother. The poem is so densely packed with precise and prosaic details, there is little room for emotion, let alone charged language. The volume's title is a change-up, for McMichael's attention is leveled not at the big picture but at the world's infinite parts. (Nov.)