Brawl & Jag: Poems

Bernard (Romanticism) showcases varied subjects and speakers in this uneven fifth collection, delivering youthful remembrances as well as present-day elegies and examinations of the natural and literary worlds. There are persona poems, too: in distant tundras women shoot wolves in the face, and in 20th-century Italy, an invented poet hides out in a hotel. But the book benefits most from homing in on private moments, which ring truest and remain with the reader. In one of the collection's elegiac moments, when the speaker intends "to drive/ and find that bar, the one we liked/ in Jacksonville// and ask some man to go out back," it's the "beer-sweat like pear juice" that lingers long after. In the book's opening poem, the narrator declares "I miss my anger" and drags readers through furious vignettes in which a thrown "pot of hot coffee" just misses "a man's head, and the black-brown spatter stains" still remain years later. Readers will feel for the book's confessions, as when, in "Across the Lawn," the speaker witnesses the grim evidence of a beloved pet's untimely death. The collection falters when Bernard moves away from the personal, and by the end the reader comes to miss these moments and their frankness, fallibility, and focus. (Mar.)