The Fire in All Things: Poems

For all of its erudition--Greek dedications, Latin mottos, French phrases--this winner of the 1992 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets (judged by Richard Howard) is essentially a debut collection of effete confessional poetry replete with descriptions of prettified botany including mistletoe, bougainvillea and wisteria. Characteristically, the speaker addresses an anonymous ``You,'' dropping hints about the life they lead together, usually in exotic or foreign surroundings, while retaining a coquettish stance that excludes the reader. The verse is structured with exaggerated irony and tortuous syntax (``Hornblasts! They jarred us from the engines' snore / And cheesy air of what the door sign called / The `Dinning Room' to spraydrift, sidechurn. . . ''). Yenser often employs enjambment from line to line or stanza to stanza, with a mannered effect (``Yet, how to pluck, to be plucked like the harp / the rain has hanged upon the willow / Before it learns the plot to break. . . ''). In the end, the poems seem out of date (characters wire news to one another and speak in witty archaisms), and the painstaking attention to the details of picturesque setting creates a self-consciously ornamental work. (Apr.)